BHF renews £10 million investment in pioneering cardiovascular data science 

The British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre has secured renewed funding from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to continue its vital work over the next five years.  

This £10 million investment will enable the Centre to build on its successes in harnessing health data to improve the understanding, prevention, and treatment of heart and circulatory conditions. 

The BHF Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) was established in 2020 and has become recognised as a national hub for cardiovascular data research.  

The Centre works with researchers, clinicians, patients, and data custodians across the UK, and supports groundbreaking projects that use large-scale health data. The aim is to unlock new insights from the data and inform public health policy to transform the lives of people with cardiovascular conditions. 

In the past five years:

• The Centre has built a thriving community of more than 400 scientists working on critical COVID-19 related research. The CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT consortium has investigated the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines in adults and children, uncovered the importance of detailed ethnicity data in health records, and leveraged large-scale data to investigate rare diseases. 
• Connections with data custodians have enabled secure access to health data on a population scale in England, Scotland and Wales. The approach has cut the time it takes accredited scientists to access data for approved projects, accelerating both the analysis and the findings.  
• The Centre’s health data science team has developed a suite of resources, offering bespoke support to researchers with their analysis. This includes tables and dashboards for researchers to understand what data is available before they start work, and reusable code and tools to save more time when projects are underway. 
• A group of public contributors has been created to help steer the Centre’s work and make sure it meets the needs of people affected by cardiovascular conditions. They’ve also helped with easy-to-understand explainers, developed the Centre’s patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) strategy, and designed an Imaging Open Challenge. 

The new funding will see the Centre continue to improve heart and cardiovascular health through the power of large-scale data and advanced analytics. The focus for the next five years will be on two broad themes: 

• Efficiency – faster and easier trustworthy data use for all cardiovascular researchers 
• Quality – enabling better cardiovascular research with better data. 

This focus on infrastructure and expanded data services will help serve the entire cardiovascular community. The Centre is also exploring how to integrate more data types, like medical imaging and regional NHS data, that provide greater detail and depth to generate richer insights into heart health. 

Patients and the public will remain at the heart of the Centre’s work. The Centre wants to embed lived experience from diverse voices into the full research cycle from design to dissemination, enabling patients and the public to influence how health data is accessed, analysed, and translated into real-world impact. 

Director of Health Data Research UK Professor Andrew Morris said,

“This funding recognises the contribution and impact of the BHF Data Science Centre team at Health Data Research UK, and is an important step in strengthening the UK’s national health data research infrastructure. Enhancing and developing new data services, underpinned by public trust, transparency, and governance, will support the Centre to continue enabling the best cardiovascular data research at pace and at scale. The ambition is to make a tangible difference to the lives of 7.6 million people living with cardiovascular disease in the UK. 

“Initiatives like the BHF Data Science Centre are only possible through collaboration across academia, the NHS, charities, industry, and critically the public.” 

Professor James Leiper, Director of Research at the British Heart Foundation, said,

“We are delighted to continue supporting the BHF Data Science Centre’s vital mission to further explore the extraordinary potential of cutting edge data science to tackle cardiovascular disease, which remains a leading cause of death in the UK. 

“The Centre’s impact in enabling data-led research to flourish has delivered many impactful outcomes to date. At BHF we look forward to the seeing the Centre achieve its aims of facilitating more efficient access to high quality research-ready data to allow researchers to deliver benefits for patients.” 

Interim Director of the BHF Data Science Centre Professor Steffen Petersen said,

“We welcome this renewed funding as a significant milestone for the BHF Data Science Centre and the wider cardiovascular research community. It’s a real testament to everyone who works within and with the Centre, and highlights the power of bringing together the best data, analytics, and multidisciplinary expertise across the UK, all the while grounded in the lived experience of patients and the public. 

“We’re grateful for the support and trust of our funders and partners, particularly the BHF, as we move into this new chapter. We can be confident that this investment will help us to deliver faster, fairer, and more impactful benefits for researchers, patients, and the NHS.” 

Suzannah Power, a public contributor working with the BHF Data Science Centre, said,

“This is such a positive step.  It’s recognition of the success of the last five years’ of BHF Data Science Centre projects using large-scale data, and it’s an endorsement of the power of collaboration – between the research teams, the clinicians, public health and, of course, those with lived experience of heart and circulatory conditions.  The Health Data Science Team have worked hand in hand with its team of public contributors every step of the way to ensure research is relevant and equitable.  It’s good to be part of their success, for now and for future generations.” 

Over the next five years, the BHF Data Science Centre will continue to work collaboratively with partners and the research community to deliver on its mission: enabling data-led research to improve heart and circulatory health for millions of patients and their families in the UK.