The University of Bristol has been awarded £2.7 million by the Medical Research Council (MRC) to create a new research centre which will apply knowledge from genetic analyses to large-scale studies of the health of the population.  These investigations will aim to find the factors that are causing disease, which can then be influenced to reduce risk.

Establishing links between risk factors and the development or progression of diseases determines the best ways to prevent and treat them. However traditional techniques have been unable to work out what is actually causing diseases because there are so many potential risk factors.

The new Bristol-based MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology will aim to tackle this problem by applying new molecular-based methods for identifying the causes of disease.  This approach requires scientists from across several disciplines to work and learn together.

George Davey Smith, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in the University’s Department of Social Medicine and head of the new MRC Centre, said: “Conventional study of patterns of disease has made important contributions to understanding their causes.  A notable example is the work pioneered by Sir Richard Doll that identified the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, heart disease and other health problems.  Those findings have already saved millions of lives.  This centre aims to take this type of work into the 21st century, making full use of the wealth of data and methods we now have at our fingertips.”

The Bristol centre is one of six new MRC Centres being set up around the country with the ultimate aim of finding ways to translate research findings into practice.  The MRC has provided a total of £15.5million over the next five years to fund the six centres which will encourage collaboration between scientists working in different disciplines.  

The centres will focus on transplant medicine, obesity, neuromuscular diseases, genomics and global health, outbreak analysis and modelling, and the molecular causes and indicators of disease.