The Francis Crick Institute and The Alan Turing Institute have entered a partnership to collaborate on projects that use biomedical data to study a range of biological and medical topics, unlocking new understandings about health and disease.
The partnership will fund and support projects where data scientists and medical researchers from the two institutes work together, sharing data, expertise and resources.
To mark the launch of the partnership, the collaboration is funding four 12-month projects where early career data scientists on secondment to the Turing from a range of universities including Imperial College London, Universities of Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester work with biomedical data generated by Crick scientists.
These projects will aim to improve understanding about diseases, including cancer. As part of one project, researchers will analyse data from studies involving mice with lung cancer, specifically looking at how interactions between cells impact cancer immunotherapy treatments. While another project will see data scientists develop an open-access software toolbox to make it easier to analyse data about neuron populations.
Other projects will be launched as the partnership continues.
Dr Rebecca Wilson, head of strategic partnerships at the Crick says: “Bringing together experts with complementary expertise from our neighbouring institutes to work together under this first formal partnership is very exciting.
“We hope that the networks and links created over the next three years will open up new avenues for research, which will continue for many years to come.”
Katrina Payne, The Alan Turing Institute’s Partnerships Development Lead, said, “This is an exciting collaboration which will enable us to advance data centric biomedical science together with knowledge exchange and talent development. We look forward to seeing this partnership drive new and innovative projects in the future.”
Julian Downward, associate researcher director at the Crick says: “We are very excited that this partnership will bring together leading data scientists from Turing and medical researchers from Crick to achieve transformational change in tackling problems central to human health. We are hoping that this will create a new culture of integrating big data with biology to greatly boost progress in biomedical research.”
The partnership is for an initial term of three-years, with a hope it will continue beyond this. More information on the partnership and the specific projects is available on the Turing website.
