The BHF Data Science Centre, led by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), has launched a rapid grant funding call to advance data-driven research focused on cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and the interaction with COVID-19.
Aims
The aim of this call is to support data science research into COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease and kidney disease, with a total fund of £50,000 to support research as part of the CVD-COVID-UK Consortium. In addition, the BHF DSC Health Data Science team will support by signposting to relevant data curation resources, providing guidance to help researchers navigate and effectively utilise the data available. The team can also provide further data curation support and assist with the development of pipelines to generate analysis-ready datasets.
We expect to fund a minimum of two projects, focusing on the causes, consequences, or care of kidney disease and aligning to one of the six priority areas identified by the Kidney Data Science Catalyst. The resulting research outputs should have the potential to make a positive impact on the lives or experiences of people with kidney disease.
Background
The BHF Data Science Centre was set up in 2020 to enable and accelerate data-led research to improve heart and circulatory health. During the pandemic, much of our work switched to focus on COVID-19.
CVD-COVID-UK
One area of our current activity is the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Consortium, which brings together researchers from all over the UK to look at the relationship between cardiovascular health and COVID-19. The programme allows linkage across patient datasets within three national Trusted Research Environments (TREs) in the UK, to help understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease. Approved researchers can remotely access and link de-identified datasets including national hospital, primary care, and COVID-19 test data with cardiovascular datasets.
Kidney Data Science Catalyst
More recently, we launched the Kidney Data Science Catalyst with our partners – HDR UK, Kidney Research UK, and the British Heart Foundation – 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.
Scope
This call is to fund researchers who are existing members of – or are willing to join – the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT consortium. The funding is available for between six to eight months, with projects commencing in May 2025.
Eligibility
Applications will be invited from researchers at an eligible research organisation, including universities, NHS bodies, and government-funded organisations. Applicants may only submit one application to this initiative as a principal investigator, but may be involved in more applications if listed as a co-investigator.
To apply
The call is now open for applications and will close at 17:00 GMT on 31st January 2025.
For further information please download the call specification, funding template and proposal form here. All proposals to be submitted to bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk and procurement@hdruk.ac.uk by the deadline.
Please submit enquiries and clarification requests to bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk and Procurement@hdruk.ac.uk by no later than Friday 17th January 2025.