The Kennedy Trust are delighted to be a strategic funding partner in a new MRC Centre of Excellence (CoRE) in Restorative Immunology.

The MRC will invest up to £50m over the next 14 years in the new centre which will develop innovative therapies aimed at restoring immune balance and tissue health, with an ambition is to achieve lasting freedom from disease and transform the lives of people who face debilitating immune-mediated diseases (IMIDs) throughout their lives.

The Kennedy Trust will provide an additional £400k of strategic funding to the centre, with a focus on investing in early and late stage translational training.  

The centre, led by the University of Birmingham, brings together a team of investigators across eight universities including Kyoto University, Newcastle University, University College London, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. They will collaborate alongside charities, public engagement organisations and industry to understand what causes these diseases and develop new treatments targeting their causes.

The successful bid demonstrates the impact of the Trust’s previous investments. The new centre builds on the Trust’s original £7 million investment to establish the Arthritis Therapy Acceleration Platform (A-TAP) in 2017, while the Trust previously supported the project lead Professor Adam Croft through a £2.5m Senior Research Fellowship. We also continue to provide significant support for the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at Oxford, a key partner in the centre.

Dr Edith Hessel, Chair of the Kennedy Trust Research Committee, said ‘The work of Adam Croft and colleagues in securing this funding is a major achievement and will drive forward the pace of understanding the relationship between tissue and immune system in disease pathology and how this can be restored.  We are excited to be a strategic funding partner and supporting the potential that this work has to unlock in therapeutic translation’