The Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health run by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London is unique in the UK.

Aim of the Centre

To ensure that biomedical research is translated into clear improvements for people with mental health conditions.

This will mean that service users will benefit more quickly from advances in research. Sometimes called ‘bench-to-bedside’, translational biomedical research takes advances in basic science and turns these into advances in medical care. The basic sciences relevant to the Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health include:

• applied sciences such as statistics and computing, physics and chemistry.
• epidemiology and psychology, and
• genetics and molecular biology

The centre is led by Professor Simon Lovestone. The partners involved already have a long history of collaborative research and development in the field of mental health, but the centre brings together basic researchers, clinical researchers and clinical staff to work on a number of main themes:

• Antisocial and aggressive behaviour
• Clinical neurosciences, including motor neuron disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and pain
• Common mental conditions
• Dementia and related syndromes
• Psychosis
• Substance use problems
• Young people and mental health

Service users and carer involvement, and issues of culture, ethnicity and gender, are integral to the work of the Centre. Cross cutting themes which apply to all of the areas of research are:

• advancing research in electronic medical records
• developments in brain imaging
• epidemiology and the health of local populations
• genetics, and
• other basic sciences relevant to mental health research.

Current research plans include:

• Using findings from laboratory-based genetic research to develop treatments that are targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup.
• Using neuroimaging (brain scans) to increase understanding of how the brain works in different mental health conditions and how responses to treatment might be measured.
• Trying to find better ways to measure and to understand the risk of getting mental health problems.
• Developing biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders. A biomarker is a biological indicator (e.g. a protein or a brain scan) of a process, event or condition (e.g. ageing or disease).

The centre will be working in partnership with other academic groups and industry to complement its expertise, to shape its research, and to improve the practical use of research work and the development of products for service users’ benefit.

An important role for the Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health will be in training future ‘translational researchers’. These will be people who started their careers in a laboratory and want to make their research more relevant to patients, or clinicians working in the NHS who would like to develop their knowledge of more basic research. The Centre aims to fund both groups of people at different stages of their careers.

For more information visit our website http://www.slam.nhs.uk/about-us/biomedical-research-centre/brc-home.aspx