UK Research and Innovation’s Post

UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Aoife M Doyle's research on young people’s health in Zimbabwe has integrated youth and community engagement into every research stage.     Her project, Y-Check, is guided by a youth advisory panel and purposefully embeds research conducted by mentored youth researchers.     The Y-CHECK intervention was co-designed with adolescents, parents, teachers, and healthcare workers. She implemented a crowdsourcing contest and hackathon with young people to design the intervention brand which engaged young people with Y-Check.     For International Adolescent Health Week, we asked her for her learnings from the project. She says: "Engaging with study communities is essential as their input will strengthen the research plans. Engagement helps build and strengthen trust and understanding between study communities and researchers. "When the community trust and understand the research plans, they provide invaluable support to the study during planning, implementation, and dissemination of the findings. "Engaging young people in the development and evaluation of interventions addressing their needs is insightful and rewarding. It is important and feasible to engage young people in all stages of a research study including planning, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. "It’s important to be aware and let the young people know that it won’t be possible to take all suggestions on board- this is because not all young people have the same opinions and needs, and because decisions need to take into account ethical and clinical considerations and the resources available. " More about Aiofe's work, which won the Public Engagement award at the FLF Awards earlier this year - in the video below.

Proteins are the building blocks of life, so being able to predict their shape and design them with a specific shape and function has huge ramifications for our understanding of medicine and disease. Yesterday’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry recognised Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work on AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s breakthrough AI system that stunned the scientific community in 2020 by accurately predicting protein structures. Google DeepMind worked with European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI to provide free and open access to predicted structures for the full human proteome - the set of all proteins in the human body - and 20 model organisms in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB). AFDB now includes over 200 million predictions for nearly every protein known to science and is used by over 1.6 million researchers across 190 countries. It is an essential tool for biological research, accelerating our understanding of disease, drug development, tackling antimicrobial resistance, designing climate change resilient crops, and plastic-eating enzymes to tackle pollution. AlphaFold wouldn’t exist without the work of scientists - underpinned by long-term research funding, infrastructure investment and data-sharing policies - who spent decades uncovering hundreds of thousands of protein structures and sharing them in public archives, like those at EMBL-EBI. Charlotte Deane, executive chair of EPSRC, said: "These AI algorithms are already fundamentally changing the way we discover and design new medicines. “It is an exciting time to be working in science, particularly in these interdisciplinary areas, as AI not only starts solving really hard problems but is also changing the way we do science.” Our congratulations to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker on their Nobel Prize.

Proteins are the building blocks of life, so being able to predict their shape and design them with a specific shape and function has huge ramifications for our understanding of medicine and disease. Yesterday’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry recognised Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work on AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s breakthrough AI system that stunned the scientific community in 2020 by accurately predicting protein structures. Google DeepMind worked with European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI to provide free and open access to predicted structures for the full human proteome - the set of all proteins in the human body - and 20 model organisms in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB). AFDB now includes over 200 million predictions for nearly every protein known to science and is used by over 1.6 million researchers across 190 countries. It is an essential tool for biological research, accelerating our understanding of disease, drug development, tackling antimicrobial resistance, designing climate change resilient crops, and plastic-eating enzymes to tackle pollution. AlphaFold wouldn’t exist without the work of scientists - underpinned by long-term research funding, infrastructure investment and data-sharing policies - who spent decades uncovering hundreds of thousands of protein structures and sharing them in public archives, like those at EMBL-EBI. Charlotte Deane, executive chair of EPSRC, said: "These AI algorithms are already fundamentally changing the way we discover and design new medicines. “It is an exciting time to be working in science, particularly in these interdisciplinary areas, as AI not only starts solving really hard problems but is also changing the way we do science.” Our congratulations to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker on their Nobel Prize.

Investment in research and innovation are vital to improving healthcare, from faster diagnoses for cancer to personalised medicine. We’re announcing significant new investments in healthcare research across the UK to accelerate the development of new technologies that can improve people’s lives. First, we’re announcing five new Healthcare Research and Partnership Hubs, bringing together academia, industry and charities to improve population health, transform disease prediction and diagnosis, and accelerate the development of new interventions.   Each hub, funded via EPSRC and partners, will deliver a world-leading research programme focused on advancing and developing novel engineering and physical sciences research. And to ensure their research has maximum impact each hub will work with patients, people with lived experience and health professionals.   Their work will include developing tech such as: - robotic clothing that ‘puts itself on and takes itself off’ - creating low-cost, portable devices to detect the early signs of cancer - developing a new approach for the administration of drugs for conditions - requiring regular medication, from high blood pressure to diabetes and asthma - speeding up and reducing the time required to bring new drugs to market by testing using microdosing - overcoming barriers to the use of mesenchymal stem cells to help tissue regeneration to repair broken bones and in chemotherapy.   We’re also, via Medical Research Council, supporting the MANIFEST consortium, led by The Francis Crick Institute, to support the better targeting of immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer. MANIFEST will examine biomarkers present in patients before they start immunotherapy, as the first step towards developing tests that can monitor these biomarkers during treatment. These tests could help indicate if a given treatment is likely to work, helping doctors to personalise immunotherapy treatments to individual patients.   And Innovate UK have announced the remaining six winners of the latest Advancing Precision Medicine funding call, including projects to better diagnose cancers.   This announcement comes ahead of the International Investment Summit next week, which will showcase how key sectors like life sciences drive investment into the UK. More details at ukri.org, or on EPSRC, Innovate and MRC’s channels.

We are pleased to announce that Peter Kyle has appointed four new non-executive members to UKRI Board. They will work with our Chair, Sir Andrew Mackenzie, to support and challenge UKRI to ensure the organisation achieves its strategic objectives and fulfils its vision. The appointments are: - Annie Callanan, CEO of EBSCO Information Services - Jane Norman, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of Nottingham - Rita Dhut, Chair of JP Morgan European Growth and Income - Russell Schofield-Bezer, CEO of RSB Advisory Ltd Sir Andrew Mackenzie said: "I am thrilled to welcome our newest board members, whose diverse expertise and innovative perspectives will be invaluable as we pursue our vision of harnessing the power of research and innovation to transform lives and drive economic growth. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing board members, John Fingleton, Ian Boyd and Anthony Finkelstein, for their guidance and expertise." More on the new appointments: https://lnkd.in/drF7KYwR