New call for funding open 6th January 2025 – 31st January 2025
The BHF Data Science Centre Kidney Catalyst has launched a new call for funding, in partnership with Kidney Research UK. This opportunity offers researchers up to £50,000 in funding and in-kind support for innovative projects addressing kidney disease, cardiovascular health, and COVID-19.
Discover more about eligibility and the application processWhat is the ‘Kidney Data Science Catalyst’?
Funded by Kidney Research UK in partnership with the BHF, the overarching aim of the Kidney Data Catalyst is to facilitate the use of existing health data to speed up research into better kidney and cardiovascular disease prevention, treatments, and care for those living with kidney disease and their families.
Professor Samira Bell is the Theme Lead for the Kidney Data Science Catalyst.
Why is the ‘Kidney Data Science Catalyst’ important for cardiovascular research?
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is common, affecting 1in 10 people. Having CKD can greatly increase the risk of developing diseases of the heart and circulation (cardiovascular disease or CVD). These are the leading cause of, for example, having a heart attack or heart failure, resulting in poorer health or even death for those with CKD. The ways of preventing and treating both CKD and CVD are closely connected; being more easily able to use high quality data on these connections will be of great value to policymakers, healthcare providers, researchers and industry partners and ultimately benefit both kidney patients and those with heart disease.
What are we doing?
The Catalyst will enable researchers to securely access, link and analyse existing UK health data, speeding up the search for better kidney and cardiovascular disease prevention, treatments and care. We have established a group of patient and public contributors for the catalyst who will provide insights to the work from the perspective of those who are most impacted by kidney disease.
We aim to achieve this by:
- Working with stakeholders (including patients, research, clinical professional societies, industry) with an interest in and expertise across the spectrum of health relevant data types.
- Identifying priorities for kidney research which uses large-scale health data.
- Understanding and addressing any obstacles existing in the data systems that need to be overcome to enable different sets of health data to be linked together and analysed at UK-wide scale, to improve people’s kidney and cardiovascular health and care.
Kidney Prioritisation Process
The catalyst is undertaking a prioritisation exercise (using a modified Delphi approach) to identify and obtain agreement on the most important research questions related to kidney disease and cardiovascular disease research.
In the first phase of this process, we carried out a survey to help us to identify and prioritise the key areas in kidney and cardiovascular disease research, with input from a wide range of people. The responses from this survey were grouped into themes and presented at a workshop in November 2024.
Kidney Catalyst prioritisation themes:
- Disease Mechanisms
- Health Disparities and Equity
- Healthcare utilisation and cost effectiveness
- Multimorbidities and co-morbidities
- Treatment optimisation and effectiveness
- Prevention: Risk prediction and stratification
Areas of work
Find out more about our data-led research.
Whole Population Data
We aim to improve access to and use of high-quality, linked health datasets covering entire populations across the UK.
Defining Disease
To drive large-scale, data-driven research, we’re working to develop and share reusable definitions of cardiovascular diseases in computable forms. These definitions enable researchers to interpret and use health data, leading to more accurate and reproducible studies.
Enhancing Cohorts
We’re working to accelerate health data research by making it easier, faster, and more secure to link data from clinical cohorts with routine health records. This approach will help researchers uncover new insights into disease causes, progression, and treatment, improving patient care and outcomes.
Data Enabled Clinical Trials
By integrating routinely collected NHS health data into clinical trials, we’re helping researchers recruit participants more effectively, reduce administrative burdens, and generate real-world evidence that can lead to quicker, more impactful advances in cardiovascular care.
Imaging
Cardiovascular imaging research has the potential to transform disease diagnosis, risk assessment, and treatment. This area aims to improve access to imaging data linked to health-relevant datasets across the UK, enabling innovative research and improving patient outcomes.
Smartphones and Wearables
We’re working to unlock the potential of smartphone and wearable data to discover new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cardiovascular disease, by establishing secure access to and fair use of smartphone and wearable data linked to healthcare records.
CVD-COVID-UK / COVID-IMPACT
One of seven National Flagship Projects approved by the NIHR-BHF Cardiovascular Partnership, linking population healthcare datasets across the UK to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular diseases.
Diabetes Data Science Catalyst
This exciting partnership between the BHF Data Science Centre, Diabetes UK and HDR UK aims to develop improvements in our understanding of the link between cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.
Stroke Data Science Catalyst
This partnership between the BHF Data Science Centre, HDR UK and the Stroke Association will enable researchers to securely access, link and analyse existing UK health data, speeding up the search for better stroke prevention, treatments and care.