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Industry Partnerships

Driving innovation through collaborative research partnerships with industry

A proven centre for translational medicine and data-enabled clinical testing and evaluation, Birmingham is a destination of choice for originating and validating healthcare innovations, working in partnership with businesses, academics, clinicians and patients.

We collaborate with organisations of all sizes, from global corporates through to SMEs and start-ups and we tailor each collaboration to meet your specific needs.

BHP provides the environment and physical spaces to support businesses and the commercialisation of innovations. From early-stage, fully serviced incubation at the BioHub, acceleration support at the Institute of Translational Medicine (ITM), through to a range of incubation, grow-on and pre-let spaces at the Precision Health Technologies Accelerator and Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, we deliver the necessary spaces and services to support successful business development and growth.

Through the BHP network, our industry partners will have access to expertise from our world class clinicians, academics and scientists spanning multiple therapeutic areas, such as inflammation, immunology and immunotherapy, oncology and trauma – as well as our four strategic research priority areas. In addition, we facilitate access to well curated clinical data and tissue; support identification and testing of new therapeutics and biomarkers in our patient populations; pioneer the design of new clinical trials to support innovative medicine; and speed-up the process of drug discovery.

In order to deliver mutually beneficial and highly successful partnerships, we host an impressive portfolio of key facilities in the following areas

Birmingham is the perfect place to invest in life sciences innovations and our extensive experience of working in partnership with industry provides a solid platform for collaboration.

Sitting at the heart of a large, diverse and stable West Midlands population of nearly 6 million, BHP provides a unique healthcare ecosystem, which harnesses the power of existing NHS, academic, citizen and industrial partnerships to deliver innovation in therapies, diagnostics and devices – at pace and at scale.

About our industry partnerships

Advanced therapies

Cell and gene therapies offer ground-breaking opportunities for the treatment of disease and injury. Advanced therapies could generate an estimated £10bn in revenue for the UK – as well as creating 18,000 jobs – by 2035. Regionally, the Birmingham led MW ATTC network has delivered 50% of UK cell therapy trials and 7% of global cell therapy trials. Birmingham was also the first licenced site in the UK to host and deliver FMT trials.175 high-value jobs could open in industry and the NHS over the next five years as new therapies, products and services are developed and deployed. 

Our clinicians and academics partner industry across a number of advanced therapy facilities (links open in new window):

Clinical trials: design and methodology

Birmingham has one of Europe’s largest clinical trial portfolios, co-ordinated locally and globally. Our population can support projects of significant scale, and our NHS Trusts regularly top the NIHR Research Activity League table for the West Midlands: together, BHP’s NHS members recruited more than 24,000 participants to 617 different studies in 2018/19. University Hospitals Birmingham also featured in the top five Trusts nationwide for research activity in commercial studies, collaborating with industry partners on 119 studies.

Our experts in clinical trials designs and methodology work across two main facilities (links open in new window):

Drug discovery

At the heart of one of the UK’s largest clusters of life sciences businesses, BHP’s collaborative ecosystem provides an outstanding environment for academic-led drug discovery and the search for the next generation of therapies. 

Supporting this exceptional translational activity are a host of talented, interdisciplinary scientific researchers specialising in pharmaceutical production processes, target and drug discovery, toxicology and companion diagnostics, among many others. They can be found working across of a number of facilities:

Health data

With over 20 years of longitudinal digital health data records, we are at the forefront of digital healthcare innovation and have the expertise to help businesses use our technology and data in a meaningful way.

Industry partners working with BHP benefit from safe and secure access to integrated real-world data – from across and beyond our region – coupled with detailed analysis by our experts. This enables a detailed understanding of diseases and treatments at patient and population level. 

Our health data expertise can be accessed via (links open in new window):

The University of Birmingham is also part of the Alan Turing Institute Partnership.

Watch Professor Elizabeth Sapey as she explains how industry partners can work with PIONEER – the Health Data Research Hub for Acute Care – to improve patient experience and treatment.

Inflammation and healthy aging

One of the greatest social changes in the 21st Century will be the ageing of all populations. The number of people over 60 years of age around the globe is 960 million and is expected to rise to 3.1 billion by 2100.

Healthy lifespan is not keeping pace and ageing carries a heightened risk of physical and mental frailty as well as life-threatening and debilitating chronic diseases. Three million people are now experiencing two or more age-related diseases (“multi-morbidity”) such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease and dementia.

An improvement in healthy life-span will provide very significant societal and individual quality-of-life benefits.

Birmingham hosts impressive infrastructure and assets as well as intellectual leadership in health ageing, including (links open in new window):

Medical technology

Our integrated ecosystem allows industry partners to rapidly develop and test new technologies and tools, and see them through to clinical adoption. We offer both the facilities and the expertise to undertake early-stage research, product development and validation – alongside pre-clinical and clinical evaluation. 

Facilities in this specialty include (links open in new window):

Personalised medicine

Pioneering and life-changing work takes place across several leading facilities, which enable productive interactions between clinicians, academics, industry and patients to accelerate the field of personalised, precision medicine. By enabling integrated, multidisciplinary working, BHP helps bring about answers to complex healthcare issues for the direct benefit of people worldwide.

These facilities include (links open in new window):

Rare diseases

Several of our NHS Trusts benefit from dedicated rare disease facilities – one-stop clinics where patients (with their carers) undergo pre-planned diagnostic tests and see all relevant specialists and the multi-disciplinary team in one visit. 

The centres also facilitate the rapid assessment of cost-effective new drugs and medical devices within clinical settings, providing a single point of entry for individuals, organisations and business seeking to maximise biomedical research translation for the benefit of industry, the economy and patients.

More information on these facilities can be found on the following pages (links open in new window):

Find out more

To engage with our BHP Industry Partnerships Team please contact businessteam@contacts.bham.ac.uk