24 June 2025

The second round of Centre for Translational Medicine Pilot Funding has been awarded to 10 researchers.

The scheme offers one-year funding of up to £60,000 for researchers across King’s Health Partners (KHP). These awards are designed to stimulate, accelerate and enhance translational medicine research across KHP. Specifically, this one-year award will allow pump priming, and will support the generation of pilot data, enabling substantive awards to be secured from external sources.

Patient representatives and clinical academics across all partners have been involved at every stage of decision-making on funding awards. Thirty-three excellent applications were shortlisted for panel review.

Prof Mona Bafadhel, Chair of the panel and Director of the King’s Centre for Lung Health, said:

These pump priming awards can really be the extra support people need to secure the next stage of funding. It was exciting to see such a diverse range of applications from across the partnership.

The following 10 awards have been made to these lead researchers and projects:

  • Dr David Lloyd, “Doppler Ultrasound-Gated, Motion-Corrected 4D Flow Fetal Cardiac MRI.”
  • Jonathan Shapey, “Detection of cerebral ischaemia using real-time hyperspectral imaging: a preclinical feasibility study.”
  • Prof Jonathan Cohen “Respiratory metagenomics in diagnosis of respiratory infection in children.”
  • Dr Emily McBride, “Reducing Mental Health Inequalities in Access to GLP-1 Therapies and Bariatric Surgery: Evaluating a Novel Behaviour Change Intervention for Binge Eating Disorder.”
  • Prof Robin Ali, “Development of a scalable, automated manufacturing process for a photoreceptor cell therapy.”
  • Dr Daniel Bromage, “Charting Unseen Territories: Establishing the Feasibility of PET-CT for Illuminating Cardiac Inflammation in Post-Myocardial Infarction Patients with Clonal Haematopoiesis.”
  • Dr Petroula Laiou, “From Skin To Brain: Investigating Non-Invasive Seizure Forecasting Via Tactile Stimulation.”
  • Ifeanyi Uzochukwu, “Saving Faces, Saving Lives: Early Detection of Noma through Metabolite Biomarkers.”
  • Prof Pablo Lamata, “A digital twin of the lungs to bring ECMO therapy in the precision medicine era.”
  • Prof James Arnold, “Proof of concept: HO-1 targeting therapy for enhanced radiation responses in brain cancers.”

The Centre for Translational Medicine brings together the organisations of King’s Health Partners and generous funding from the Guy's and St Thomas' Charity to work in partnership to improve the health of people locally, nationally, and globally.

This is through accelerating research and innovation that improves the detection, prevention, and treatment of disease. 

The Centre for Translational Medicine aims to: 

  • address the major health burdens for local, national and global communities – and to challenge existing health inequalities;  
  • combine our outstanding clinical and scientific expertise to deliver excellent outcomes for patients;   
  • develop the next generation of clinical-academic leaders, skilled in delivering impactful translational biomedical research.   

For more information about the Centre for Translational Medicine and its funding offers, email: translationalmedicine@kcl.ac.uk.