Embed, Build, Accelerate – Manchester BRC Director’s blog – July 2025
Author: Professor Anne Barton View External profile (opens in new window)
Director of NIHR Manchester BRC
Hello and a very warm welcome to my latest Embed, Build, Accelerate blog as the Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).
In this edition of Embed, Build, Accelerate, I want to focus on the area of Digital and how we are implementing our new Digital Infrastructure (DI) Strategy across Manchester BRC.
The DI programme is a key component of our organisation. The DI team of research data engineers and information governance experts provides support for our colleagues across 3 broad areas: access to data, data science, and translation and adoption of health technologies to clinical practice.
Led by Professor Alejandro Frangi, as DI Lead, the team is hosted at The University of Manchester’s Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology Research and Innovation. In addition to providing greater integration and growth opportunities, embedding the DI team at the Pankhurst Institute facilitates joint translational research activities and the development of health solutions that will benefit patients and address local healthcare needs across Greater Manchester (GM), Lancashire, and South Cumbria.
Over the past 12 months, the team have developed our new DI Strategy in consultation with BRC colleagues, patients and the public, and Theme Leads, to better understand how the team can support our work and meet our digital enablement aims and ambitions. It was important we had those conversations, considering the complexities of what needs to be implemented and how this relates to our teams, and so we developed our DI Strategy with both Manchester BRC and national priorities in mind.
With that strategy in place, we are now building the team and working to deliver the functional and technical requirements and priorities we know our Themes and Clusters need.
Access to different health data sets – and the safe storage of data in line with information governance requirements – plays such a fundamental role in our research. We have provided support and expertise to enable the transition of the Greater Manchester (GM) Care Record to the GM Secure Data Environment (SDE), managed by Health Innovation Manchester. This facilitated the Lighthouse (Alpha/Driver) Projects, many of which were drawn from our BRC Themes. We want to build on this and will aim to provide further technical support for the SDE programme.
The Christabel Pankhurst Institute has contributed to raise major GM funding awards and grants that will now be supported by the DI, such as the British Heart Foundation’s Centre of Research Excellence, which integrates researchers across cardiovascular science, data science, and AI, as well as methodological and regulatory thought leadership articles, and 26 publications. Another significant initiative is the UK Centre for In-Silico Regulatory Science and Innovation, sponsored by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and jointly funded by Innovate UK and the Medical Research Council (MRC). This centre, headquartered in Manchester, will contribute to supporting the UK government’s growth mission and regulatory reform, which will be crucial for the present and future of our BRC.
In terms of our national impact, Prof Frangi is the Chair of the BRCs Sub-National Secure Data Environments (SDEs) Working Group as part of the NIHR BRC Informatics Forum. The working group serves as a strategic interface between all the BRCs and all the sub-national SDEs in England, aiming to advance the BRCs’ experimental medicine objectives while enhancing the capabilities of the sub-national SDEs.
In June 2025, we had the privilege of hosting a NIHR BRC Informatics Forum and its BRCs Sub-National Secure Data Environments (SDEs) Working Group meeting at the Pankhurst Institute. This brought together Digital leads from all BRCs, NHS SDE leads, the NHS England Data for Research and Development team, and Professor Marian Knight, Scientific Director for Research Infrastructure at the NIHR, for important conversations around the direction of travel. (Group pictured outside the Pankhurst)
Looking ahead, our priorities will include accelerating the delivery of the DI Strategy, expanding our team to enhance our core capabilities, including focusing on growth around areas of strength in Manchester including prediction modelling, in silico trials, AI/ML, and data access linking multiple modalities (including, for instance, imaging, wearables and omics).
We want to utilise our role within the NIHR BRC Informatics Forum to strengthen connections with other SDEs, NIHR capabilities and the newly formed CERSI network (Centres of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation)?.
We will keep you informed on all these developments we continue to contribute to at a regional and national level, and our ambition for digital infrastructure to support complex analytics on multimodal data.
Please remember you can stay up to date with the latest news from Manchester BRC by following us on LinkedIn, on X via @ManchesterBRC or read the latest news on our website.
Thank you