Aims 

The aim of this call is to accelerate and expand research by supporting UK-wide cardiovascular and diabetes cohort studies.  The resulting research outputs will increase understanding of these conditions, inform healthcare provision and policy, and ultimately benefit patients and their carers. 

We have consulted with members of our patient and public advisory panel throughout the development of this call for funding. 

Background  

The UK is home to a rich collection of research studies that recruit people with disease, or who are at high risk of developing disease.  These so-called ‘disease-specific cohort studies’ collect detailed information about participants and follow their health over many years to understand the causes and consequences of disease.  Patients who participate in such studies provide consent for this information to be collected.  This initial call is to support cohorts focused on cardiovascular disease and diabetes, which are amongst the commonest causes of disability and death worldwide. 

This call for funding focuses on providing a safe and secure way of linking data from routinely collected health records to the information held by these cohort studies, and making it accessible for approved research within a TRE.  

Scope 

This call is to fund a partner organisation who will work with the BHF Data Science Centre to co-develop a secure and scalable platform within an existing TRE. The funding is available for up to three years. 

The aims of this call are to enable the BHF Data Science Centre to:  

  1. Support UK-wide cardiovascular and diabetes cohort research studies to create new knowledge, accelerate and expand research outputs to benefit patients and their carers; 
  2. Co-develop, improve and enable broad use of platform and data infrastructure, capabilities and processes for secure data upload, storage, efficient linkage to national NHS records and other health-relevant data, and remote access for cohorts and their research communities;  
  3. Support multi-modal data analysis integrating a wide range of data types and advanced analytics, including machine learning approaches; 
  4. Co-develop processes to provide well curated data which will allow reproducible analysis;  
  5. Collaboratively develop and implement streamlined data governance processes to support approved access to linked cohort data by accredited researchers;  
  6. Reassure funders and other stakeholders of an efficient and cost-effective mechanism to collect, store, link and provide access to data, while satisfying all necessary legal and ethical governance and security requirements and maintaining patient and public trust.  

Eligibility  

Applications are invited from organisations across the UK that already provide an accredited TRE/TRE service and have excellent track record in delivering platform infrastructure to link cohort and health data in a safe and secure way.  

To apply  

The call is now open for applications and will close at  17:00 GMT on 30 December 2022.  Interview invitations will be sent out within two weeks after this, and the work should commence in February 2023. 

For further information please download the call specification, finance forms and proposal submission form here.  All proposals to be submitted to  bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk , by the deadline.

For queries/clarifications please email bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk by 16 December 2022. 

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