Creating a health and life sciences supercluster
The University of Liverpool is a boundary-pushing health and life sciences leader.
The Liverpool City Region (LCR) is home to a rapidly expanding Health and Life Science supercluster. The sector is worth £5 billion per annum to the city-region economy and 14.2% of gross value added (GVA), nearly double the national average.
This has been recognised by the designation of Liverpool as a Life Sciences Investment Zone, with the potential to drive up to £800 million of government and private investment to create 8,000 jobs, deliver new state of the state-of-the-art facilities and business and innovation support, while training a new generation of talent.
Informing health policy
The University is a key partner in The Pandemic Institute (TPI), a 7-way collaboration between local Liverpool academic, health and civic partners. TPI aims to develop our ability to predict pathogen emergency, prepare for likely threats, prevent spreading, develop appropriate clinical and behavioural response, and recover and re-open. The Institute notable early research includes: understanding public perception through healthcare communication and information distortion of COVID-19, mitigating Monkeypox transmission through surfaces, and modelling drug knowledge libraries for pandemic and avian flu.
In 2019, the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, with funding from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA), established the Civic Data Cooperative (CDC). The CDC connects civic organisations, industry experts, and community voices to mobilise data from across public sector organisations in the LCR. The CDC was instrumental in navigating our way through and out of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the existence of the CDC meant that a linked record system to enable trialling of lateral flow mass testing could be created in 90 days instead of 4 years. The data records are also crucial for the ground-breaking C-GULL study, following the lives of 10,000 first-born babies in the LCR.
Leading the focus on preventative medicine
The University has a long and successful history of vaccine research, improving their effectiveness, and developing new formulations to fight against devastating infectious diseases. Areas of success include the testing and mass roll out of a Rotavirus Vaccine for Infants in Malawi, discovering that longer interval between COVID-19 vaccine doses boosts immunity, the development of a novel Zika vaccine that enter clinical testing in 2022, and the development a new generation of typhoid vaccines.
The combination of the University of Liverpool’s vaccine and materials chemistry expertise makes the city an attractive area for investment and collaborative research. In 2024, AstraZeneca announced a £450 million investment in a new vaccine manufacturing and research centre in Speke. In 2022 the Pandemic Institute and CLS Seqirus signed a £5 million 5-year flu prevention.
Transforming clinical practice
The University has strong collaborations with local NHS Trusts, with 102 joint medical and dental clinical academics, 108 GMC registered medics completing PhD or master’s study, and 371 local trust clinics with honours academic affiliations. This ensures that research conducted at Liverpool is inspired by the challenges Liverpool also faces in local hospitals. Merseyside has extremely high rates of lung, trachea, and bronchus cancers, 44% higher than the English average.
The University’s Liverpool Lung Project (LLP) constructed a lung cancer risk model, enabling a clinically efficient, cost-effective method for targeted referral of high-risk individuals. Using this model, NHS England began a lung screening programme in 2019. As of 2023, the programmes had sent over 1 million invites, detected 3,000 lung cancers, and reduced lung cancer mortality by 26% in men and between 39% and 61% in women. The programme is now being extended across more areas by NHS England.
Revolutionising drug and medical treatment
The University co-directs the National Biofilms Innovation Centre (NBIC), working to deliver breakthroughs needed to prevent, detect, manage and engineer biofilms caused by microorganisms like bacteria colonising surfaces. Biofilms are implicated in more than 70% of infections and are incubators of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and have an estimated economic impact the equivalent of $5trillion globally. NBIC partners with more than 250 industries, and collaborative research by the University of Liverpool in this field includes preventing biofilms from spoiling medical equipment, developing infection-control wound dressing, and enhancing domestic hygiene and cleaning products to prevent biofilm formation with Unilever.
Established in 2020, the University’s world-first Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) is an exemplar of collaboration, in which existing pill treatments are transformed into long-acting medicines, making vital drugs much easier for patients to take and for clinicians to administer. Research areas include developing long-acting treatments for hepatitis C, products that control Tuberculosis, and expanding on the success of anti-infection drugs utilised for HIV.
The University is home to the Microbiome Innovation Centre. Advancing microbiome research enables us to understand how microbial communities impact human health. Research in this area is advancing treatment for life-long conditions such as Cystic Fibrosis and Inflammatory Bowel Disease.
In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, 97% of the University of Liverpool’s Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care research was rated as world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*), ranking it joint 3rd in the UK. 100% of the University’s impact and environment is world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*).