Centres of excellence

Arthritis Research UK has recently established a new approach to funding, called the centres of excellence. These are national centres established in areas of major strategic importance to the charity. The concept behind them is that each centre brings together individuals with expertise in a number of different areas who by combining their efforts, can bring about novel approaches to investigating particular areas. We have established a centre of excellence in research into primary care. By that I mean the common problems of back pain, and shoulder pain, and musculoskeletal pain, is a scene in primary care requiring a multidisciplinary approach form general practitioners, physiotherapists, nurses, psychologists, etc etc. We’ve established a centre of excellence in primary care at Keele University. Our second centre of excellence was in the field of bioengineering and biomechanics, bringing together orthopaedic surgeons, engineers, computer scientists, biologists, people who understand the physical loading of joints, into how joints best work and what’s the best way of treating severely damaged joints, for example in providing new approaches to joint replacement or to rehabilitation. Our third centre of excellence, which has just recently been established, is in identifying new ways of treating pain. This centre, at the University of Nottingham, is bringing together people who understand arthritis, people who understand the biology of pain, people who are doing research on pain in animals, people looking at imaging the brain, and people understanding the body’s psychological response to pain, as well as people who research new drugs. For the first time we are bringing all these different groups together, in a single centre who are going to be tackling that problem. We’ve just launched a call for universities to establish a centre of excellence in the application of cell-based therapies using modern engineering techniques to the treatment of one of the most important problems, which is osteoarthritis. We’ve asked people who are applying, can you bring together the engineering, the biology and the medicine in the hope of developing new ways of treating osteoarthritis to reduce the need of joint replacement surgery.