Who are we?

1. To develop the capacity to map the epidemiology, healthcare utilisation and outcomes for common allergic and respiratory conditions, across all parts of the health care system (including general practice and hospital specialities) for each of the UK nations in near real-time ;
2. To map variations in care processes and health outcomes, and then identify opportunities for reducing these inequalities in the short- and medium-term ;
3. To develop and validate next generation risk prediction algorithms (e.g. incorporating genetic, pollution, meteorological, wearable data and using machine learning-based approaches) to improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities ;
4. To evaluate the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and impact of these algorithms through large-scale UK-wide trials and quasi-experimental studies. 

Enhancing health care 

Our work will generate data-driven insights capable of informing health care policy and decision making, leading to real-world benefits such as: 

• Reducing the frequency and disease burden from acute deteriorations, on both patients and the health care service. This includes those triggered by respiratory tract infections in patients living with chronic respiratory conditions such as asthma or COPD 
• Improvements in disease control, quality of life and reductions in high risk of hospitalisation and deaths in those with respiratory disease and allergies 

Expanding data science capabilities 

Our work will leave behind a legacy of resources that will benefit the UK’s wider data science community. This will include: 

• The consistent curation of comprehensive, linked datasets across primary, secondary and specialist care 
• Linkage of additional data, which may include those directly related to healthcare (genetic, public health surveillance, pathology) and data which may affect or monitor health such as environmental, social and person generated data (e.g.  data collected by wearables and smart devices) 
• Providing training and expanding the pool of data analysts with the expertise and connections needed to use these datasets 
• Developing the digital infrastructure needed to run near real-time analyses across all 4 UK nations on >60m people 

Developing data infrastructure 

Our legacy of resources will revolutionise the UK’s digital health infrastructure and research capabilities. This will include: 

• Enhancing data science expertise within Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and Secure Data Environments (SDEs) across all 4 UK nations, facilitating the development of future datasets 
• The ability to run federated analyses that capture data across the UK’s TRE’s without sharing information between them 
• Expanding and enriching the variety of tools and resources to enable high quality, transparent, reproducible respiratory/allergy analyses 

Trusted Research Environments (TRES) are highly secure computing environments providing remote access to health data for approved researchers. We use them to carry out research across various scientific domains, to save and improve lives.

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 Find out more about TREs 

Find out more about the 5 'safe' principles

Our first research theme focuses on describing  the incidence and prevalence of common respiratory conditions. In time, we will expand our investigations to include other inflammation-mediated conditions, such as rheumatology.  This also includes developing the robust and transparent methodologies needed to conduct these sorts of investigations. 

Our ongoing work in this area is summarised in the following table.

Our second research theme, Predict, works towards developing models from our curated datasets to predict the diagnosis and outcomes of specific health conditions, as well as those who would benefit from earlier / alternate interventions. 

Our third sees us putting into practice the findings generated by Describe and Predict. In Intervene & Evaluate, we are identifying and developing interventions with the potential to improve health outcomes, quality of life and inequalities of care. We will then test these interventions in a real-world setting through natural experiments implemented in partnership with health care providers. 

At Inflammation and Immunity, we work together with members of the public to create high quality research that is relevant to those it impacts. We do this by ensuring public members are present throughout all our research and in the management of our programme. 

This theme is led by PPI Lead Dr Tracy Jackson. 

Find out more about our PPI 

This cross-cutting theme is dedicated to ensuring that our programme meaningfully contributes towards the larger goal of accelerating trustworthy data use across the UK. 

To achieve this, we will:  

• Develop well-curated inflammation and immunity related health data across all 4 nations of the UK, using consistent clinically validated coding. We will ensure that our methodologies are replicable to the wider research community by making the necessary documentation and resources either publicly available or available upon request.  
• Develop strong, working partnerships with other Driver Programmes, HDR UK infrastructure pillars and interested researchers to explore regulatory hurdles, and seek streamlined solutions with members of the public, TREs, other data providers and policy makers. Exploring a range of solutions in parallel will help us to discover the pros and cons of each, and to co-create best practice at the grass roots. 

Chris Orton, Technical Lead, is our theme lead for Data Infrastructure and Science.

Our programme is committed to providing pivotal training and career development opportunities to our PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs). 

This theme is led by Professor Gwyneth Davies.