Welcome to the Hammersmith Research website. There is something special about the research that is undertaken at the Hammersmith Hospitals Trust and  Imperial College London, its partner university, that makes it such an exciting and important place to work. This website is our attempt to share that excitement with you and to show you how we are advancing knowledge and understanding on so many fronts.

The sort of research that we do is aimed at making a fundamental difference to the way that a disease and ill health are managed a number of years ahead. We challenge both the basis of understanding disease and the way it is treated and handled. You will find many examples of this guiding philosophy in the sections of the report that follow. It is vital that this task is undertaken and that it is supported with resources. It would be shortsighted to consume all NHS R&D resources on the immediate, the incremental improvements and the short-term gains. Such work is important and part of the research portfolio addresses the challenge, but most of your work takes longer to reach fruition. When it does, however, the harvest is of potentially great size and constitutes a step change in the way that diseases are thought about and treated.

Our research is not done in isolation from the Trust, indeed one of our special attributes is that our clinical services are very often managed by our research academics, which gives us a rare advantage in linking research to longer-term clinical needs. These strong links between scientific enquiry and delivery of care to patients have been recognised and endorsed by Research Councils and major charities who maintain research centres and research programmes with the Trust and our academic partners. The MRC, ARC and ICRF and particularly significant investors.

Our research is not done in isolated groups. In fact, our strength lies in the linkages between research areas and researchers and in sharing of core technologies. We call this ‘joined-up research’. We put together ideas and people from a broad spectrum of disciplines to concentrate on the particular research problem. We believe our approach delivers a better product to our ultimate customers; the patients in this and others Trusts who benefit from our advances.

Our research is at the leading edge of technology and is firmly driven by technological advances. We need the most up-to-date equipment and the most up-to-date ideas and we have to be in the vanguard of learning how to apply new techniques and new technology to the research challenge. In today’s world, the demands of longer-term research and the costs of infrastructure and innovation, drive the process towards centres of excellence that can attract and retain a critical mass of the most creative brains and provide the best research training for the next generation of enquiring minds in the UK and overseas.

The Hammersmith Hospitals Trust is a special place for research in this country and this website aims to provide a sample of what we do. We have chosen to illustrate the breadth and the depth of our work but we could not hope to capture all of the details of the one thousand and more projects currently being managed at the Trust.

Professor Charles Pusey.
Head of Research and Development
Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust