The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has been awarded a Getting Building Fund grant from Hertfordshire LEP to create a Cardiovascular Imaging Centre of Excellence (C-ICE) at its Brookmans Park campus.

The centre will help bring forth the next generation of treatments for animal and human diseases and provide advanced skills training provision for academics, students and veterinary sector SMEs, helping strengthen the local skills pipeline.

Why?

Hertfordshire’s biopharma sector employs over 120,000 people and contributes more than £55Bn to the wider UK economy. Strengthening the county’s world-class science cluster is one of the major priorities identified in Hertfordshire LEP’s Economic Recovery Plan 2020 and is key to attracting inward investment and accelerating economic recovery, business growth and local job creation.

Impact

At the heart of C-ICE is a state-of-the-art 3 Tesla MRI scanner capable of producing high-resolution images of pathological conditions for diagnostic and treatment evaluation. It will also be used to investigate novel treatments initially in experimental animal models of human disease and then in veterinary patients – in particular, neurological and cardiac conditions.

The scanner will be fully integrated with RVC’s Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, home to the largest group of veterinary clinical specialists in Europe. This ‘One Health’ approach, which recognises the interconnectedness of humans, animals and ecosystems in healthcare, will enable C-ICE to support the development of precision medicine.

This combination of advanced imaging equipment and expert veterinary clinicians will be unique within Hertfordshire and the wider Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. As a result, RVC will be able to facilitate world-class translational research, clinical work and advanced skills training, while also creating highly skilled jobs in Hertfordshire.

Funding

Hertfordshire LEP has invested £2.13m from the Getting Building Fund towars this project.

The LEP invested a further £7m from the Local Growth Fund towards the creation of a Veterinary Vaccinology and Cell Therapy Hub, as part of RVC’s wider £45m redevelopment of its Brookmans Park campus.

This project was approved by the board on the 12th December 2019.