Key Collaborators

The NIHR Manchester Clinical Research Facility (CRF) provides opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds across Greater Manchester to take part in research.

Hosted by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, the Manchester CRF is the largest and most comprehensive of the 28 NIHR Clinical Research Facilities, enhancing translation of scientific advances through experimental research.

Manchester CRF operates six world-class facilities based at NHS teaching hospitals across Greater Manchester delivering a diverse range of cutting edge, early phase experimental medicine studies for adults and children at:

• The Christie
• Manchester Royal Infirmary
• North Manchester General Hospital
• Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital
• Salford Royal Hospital
• Wythenshawe Hospital

Manchester BRC aligns closely with the Manchester CRF and works collaboratively across a number of key areas including jointly-funded posts and initiatives within data management, communications, capacity building, industry and partnerships.

Manchester BRC and Manchester CRF also share a number of joint strategies including;

• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy.
• Inclusive Research Strategy – currently being developed
• Innovation and Partnerships – currently being developed
• Patient and Public Involvement, Engagement and Participation (PPIEP) Strategy.

The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester (ARC-GM) is one of 15 ARCs across England which aim to improve outcomes for patients and the public; improve the quality, delivery and efficiency of health and care services; and increase the sustainability of the health and care system both locally and nationally.

ARC-GM is hosted by Health Innovation Manchester and their over-arching goal is to improve the health of the GM population and the quality and sustainability of the health and social care they receive. This is achieved by co-producing excellent research in areas prioritised by the system and by enhancing its impact through supported implementation into policy and practice.

ARC-GM’s research activity is pivotal in finding new and evaluating better ways of preventing illness and delivering care, ensuring that Greater Manchester continues to be at the leading edge of health innovation, applied research, care and treatment.

The ARC-GM research themes reflect the specific priorities of GM:

• Organising Care
• Economic Sustainability
• Mental Health
• Healthy Ageing
• Digital Health
• Evaluation
• Implementation science.

The NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Research Collaboration (NIHR GM PSRC) aims to make health and care systems safer for everyone.

The NIHR GM PSRC is one of six collaborations across England and is hosted by the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA). Their aim is to improve patient safety across health and social care, along with narrowing the gap in health inequalities.

Working with patients, carers, and health and social care staff, their research takes place across four themes and is led by patient safety experts based at the Universities of Manchester, Nottingham and Leicester.

Manchester BRC collaborates with the GM PSRC on a number of initiatives including training and development opportunities.

The NIHR Clinical Research Network Greater Manchester (CRN GM) is part of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) which is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. With a budget of around £22 million per year, their role is to support health and care organisations across Greater Manchester, East Cheshire and East Lancashire to carry out high-quality research with our regional population.

The CRN GM are one of 15 Local Clinical Research Networks in England. In our region, they:

• help researchers to set up clinical studies quickly and effectively
• match patients with potential studies and deliver those studies to time and target
• hold intelligence about patient populations and care pathways
• support the life sciences industry to deliver their clinical research programmes
• provide health professionals with clinical research training
• work with patients to ensure their needs are at the centre of all we do

Manchester BRC works closely with the CRN GM to deliver research studies across our 13 research themes.

The NIHR HealthTech Research Centre (HRC) in Emergency and Acute Care, hosted by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust was awarded £2.9m of funding from the NIHR from 1 April 2024.

Over the next five years, the HRC will work collaboratively with innovators and commercial companies across the country and internationally to co-develop novel technology solutions for better diagnosis, treatments, and care for patients.

Bringing together NHS clinicians, academics, and the HealthTech industry, along with patients and the public, the HRC will test, evaluate, and commercialise new healthcare technologies to increase the speed, scale, and improvements in emergency care in the community and hospitals.

The Centre is one of 14 NIHR HealthTech Research Centres across England and will be a national exemplar of how public/patient-commercial-clinical-academic collaborations can bridge the gap between primary, community and secondary care to address healthcare challenges.

The Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology Research and Innovation (“the Pankhurst”) has a mission to promote needs-led health technology research and innovation, providing end-to-end support for translation into practice, and acting as an external flagship for The University of Manchester’s health technology portfolio. As a unique partnership between The University of Manchester, NHS, business, and local government with an initial investment of £25million, it forms an important part of the region’s health innovation ecosystem to enable translation of world-leading research into new products and services.

The institute’s flagship building is located on the University of Manchester’s campus on the Oxford Road Corridor. This location, as well our partnership with co-founders, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and Bruntwood SciTech, provides support for business growth by facilitating better collaboration between the NHS, researchers, and industry.

Achieving benefit from health technologies is a multi-faceted challenge which requires input from across the spectrum of academic disciplines. Alongside a focus on science and engineering, particularly digital technologies, AI and advanced materials, the Institute fosters a multidisciplinary approach to research and achieving impact. Its cross-cutting themes include responsible and inclusive innovation, translation, multi-omic health technologies (analysis and interpretation of a combination of different biological datasets such as ‘genomics’ and ‘transcriptomics’ which are collected from molecular technologies), Team Research, and digital health inequities.

The Manchester BRC’s Digital Infrastructure team are hosted by the Pankhurst, working together with the BRC on joint translational research activities and the development of health solutions that will benefit patients and address local healthcare needs across Greater Manchester. As a critical element of the “One Manchester” health innovation ecosystem, the institute:

• facilitates multidisciplinary working practices
• acts as a funnel for providing world class academic expertise
• nurtures cross-sectoral collaborations and partnerships to accelerate the development of health innovation

Translation Manchester brings together a network of support, facilities and expertise to make the pathway to translation quicker and easier.

Manchester BRC and Translation Manchester partner on a number of strategic investment initiatives and training programmes including the Innovator Training Scheme, the Innovation Labs, and the Translation Manchester Accelerator Awards.

Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) is an academic health science and innovation system, at the forefront of transforming the health and wellbeing of Greater Manchester’s 2.8 million citizens.

Health Innovation Manchester work on behalf of Greater Manchester (GM) health and care and academic system partners to discover, develop and deploy innovation aligned to the needs of GM citizens, as well as supporting economic development across the city region. We bring together our Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) and Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) functions, adding in translational research capabilities through our NIHR infrastructure that includes the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration GM (ARC-GM), NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Research Collaboration (PSRC) and NIHR Manchester Clinical Research Facility (CRF) with oversight co-ordination from our NIHR/NHSE designated Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC).  This resource is further supplemented by  a major focus on digital, including hosting the GM ICS digital transformation office).

Health Innovation Manchester plays a pivotal role in bringing forward a constant flow of targeted innovations and putting them through an effective but streamlined evaluation process so they are adopted at pace and scale across GM’s 10 localities, along with promoting GM on a national and international, building on our reputation as a pioneering city-region.

How we work together for the benefit of our population

In Greater Manchester, we have the unique ability to deliver innovation into frontline care at pace and scale thanks to our £6bn devolved health and social care system, unrivalled digital assets and ambitions, exceptional academic and research capability and thriving industry partnerships. Our collective ambition is to make Greater Manchester one of the best places in the world to grow up, get on and grow old.

Through the MAHSC Executive our NIHR infrastructure works with Health Innovation Manchester to ensure that the novel treatments and interventions it develops are accelerated to implementation through a dedicated pipeline across our newly formed integrated care system. Utilising Health Innovation Manchester’s network of external partners, our research findings can be further deployed regionally, nationally and internationally.

Find out more about Health Innovation Manchester’s work.

Academic Health Science Centres are designated by NHS England and NIHR for demonstrating excellence in health research, health education and patient care.

In April 2020, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC), part of Health Innovation Manchester, was officially designated by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and NHS England up to 2025.

MAHSC is one of only eight academic health science centres in England – and the only one in the North West. Their goal is to make new scientific discoveries and shorten the time to turn them into effective treatments to deliver benefits for patients locally and around the world.

Manchester BRC works closely with MAHSC with some shared leadership and a close alignment of MAHSC domains (Cancer, Cardiovascular and Diabetes, Inflammation and Repair, Mental Health, Neuroscience, Women and Children, and Applied Health and Care) and BRC research themes.

Health economics provides a suite of research methods to study and inform how to use resources to improve the health of populations.

At the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), health economics is delivered by a team of researchers who are based in the Manchester Centre for Health Economics at The University of Manchester.  Professor Katherine Payne is Health Economics Lead at Manchester BRC. The team’s aim is to measure the potential value of new medicines or healthcare technologies and understand what healthcare professionals, patients, carers and the public think about these interventions.

Health economics is embedded in several Themes and areas across Manchester BRC including:

Cancer Prevention and Early Detection

• Further development of an economic model (MANC-RISK-SCREEN) to evaluate risk-based breast screening strategies to include the impact of starting high-risk women on medicines to prevent cancer and taking account of uncertainty in the risk-prediction algorithm.

Next Generation Therapeutics

• Characterising the literature that has produced early economic evaluations of emerging new medicines called ‘next generation therapeutics’.
• Investigate the feasibility of using Social Impact Bonds to finance research and development activities for the development of next generation therapeutics.
• Using a combination of early (or development-phase) health technology assessment methods to quantify the burden of disease, cost of illness, and potential value of a gene therapy for rare genetic bladder conditions.

Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases

• Describing the role of stated preference studies to understand how to design digital health interventions to maximise their use in the healthcare system for the benefit of different populations.
• Understand the potential cost-effectiveness of an intervention, including a blood test to measure drug levels and a follow-up telephone call from a clinician, to improve adherence to methotrexate, a type of medicine used to treat inflammatory conditions. This analysis involved a micro-costing study and early economic analysis to inform the design of a future trial by using data from a feasibility study called ‘MIRA’ (Methotrexate use Improvement in Rheumatoid Arthritis using Biomarker Feedback).

• Understanding the potential clinical and cost-effectiveness of tapering the use of biologics for the treatment of people with inflammatory arthritis in remission.

• Understanding and measuring the quantitative link between work productivity (presenteeism measuring using the Work Productivity Activity Impairment (WPAI)) and health status (measured using the EQ5D-5L) for use in economic evaluations of workplace interventions in rheumatology.

Inclusive Research

• Understanding what factors influence clinicians and specialist nurses to recruit patients to the British Society for Rheumatology (BSR) biologics register motivated by the observation that lower than expected numbers of people with different ethnicities and across the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) are recruited to the BSR biologics register.
• Using a method called ‘Aggregate distributional cost-effectiveness analysis’ to understand the equity-impact alongside cost-effectiveness of biologics by IMD motivated by the observation of unequal recruitment of people taking a biologic to the BSR biologics register by IMD.