Birmingham Women’s Hospital to collaborate on 100,000 Genomes Project

NHS England has today (Monday, 22 December 2014) announced that Birmingham Women’s Hospital, as part of a collaboration with the University of Birmingham, UHB, BCH and Academic Health Science Network) is to be one of 11 centres across the country that are leading the way in delivering the 100,000 Genomes Project.

What is the 100,000 Genomes Project?

The three-year project, launched by the Prime Minister earlier this year, will transform diagnosis and treatment for patients with cancer and rare diseases.

The initiative involves collecting and decoding 100,000 human genomes – complete sets of people’s genes – that will enable scientists and doctors to understand more about specific conditions.

The project has the potential to transform the future of healthcare.  It could improve the prediction and prevention of disease, enable new and more precise diagnostic tests, and allow personalisation of drugs and other treatments to specific genetic variants.

Some participating patients will benefit because a conclusive diagnosis can be reached for a rare and inherited disease more quickly, or because a treatment for cancer can be targeted at the particular genetic change that is present in the cancer. But for a number of patients, the benefit will be in the improvement in our knowledge of the influence of genetics on disease and how it is expressed in an individual, how other people can be helped with similar diseases in the future, and how different types of tests can be developed to detect changes beyond the genome.

The 11 designated Genomic Medicine Centres (GMCs) in this wave 1 selection process are based across the country, covering areas including Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Oxford, Birmingham and the West Midlands, Southampton, Cambridge and the East of England, Exeter and the South West Peninsula, and the North East. Over the lifetime of the project NHS England’s ambition is to secure over 100 participating NHS trusts.  Recruitment to the project will begin from 2nd February 2015.