Three of Cardiff's leading health partners are joining forces to create a new unique collaboration designed to improve health outcomes, drive innovation, and create lasting benefits for patients.
Cardiff Health Partners (CHP) will see Cardiff University, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board and Velindre University NHS Trust come together formally to strengthen healthcare delivery, foster research excellence, economic growth, and social wellbeing across the capital and wider South East Wales region.
The new partnership hopes to contribute up to £800 million to the economy over the next decade and create thousands of skilled jobs in life sciences.
It will also open up new opportunities for colleagues to collaborate across research, clinical care and education, access cutting-edge projects that directly improve patient outcomes, and develop new skills that drive innovation benefiting patients, communities and the wider population across Wales and beyond.
"This is more than a partnership. It is a promise to work collectively for the greater good," according to Cardiff University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Wendy Larner.
We will work collaboratively, with our industry partners, to serve as a catalyst for positive change, setting new standards for collaboration and impact.
Each partner is already making a major health contributions at home and internationally. Velindre University NHS Trust provides blood and cancer health services, as well as other services, to the people of Wales, with the new Velindre Cancer Centre due to open in 2027.
Cardiff University's biomedical and life sciences research is tackling global health challenges. Supported by cutting edge assets, including the Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) and the Medicines Discovery Institute, it's helping unlock new insights into cancer, neuroscience, infection, regenerative medicine, and genomics.
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board remains one of the largest NHS organisations in Europe, serving nearly half a million people and providing specialist services. It hosts the Wales Genomic Health Centre and is responsible for the only children's hospital in Wales.
Cardiff's leading health partners unite to improve benefits for patients
Cardiff Health Partners' initial focus will be on globally recognised competitive strengths including Cancer, Brain Therapies, and Precision Medicine.
It will see the three partners linking assets and capabilities across the partnership into coherent testbeds and pathways. It's hoped this will help reduce barriers through shared governance, streamlined research delivery, and federated data access.
The three partners individually and collectively have at their disposal key assets across Cardiff - ranging from cutting edge research centres to education spaces, dedicated trials and experimentation infrastructure to large scale implementation capabilities.
Early wins such as cutting-edge Huntington's disease treatments, successes in novel trials to treat cancer, and spinouts such as Draig Therapeutics, all underpinned by modern data sharing, demonstrate pace, partner readiness, and delivery credibility.
I see Cardiff Health Partners as the means to optimise the opportunity to bring, collaborate, amplify and accelerate access to the lifechanging benefits of these new interventions and treatments for the people of South-East Wales as well as globally.
It's hoped Cardiff Health Partners will enable the organisations to access funding sources including the UK Government's £86 billion investment in science and technology, and the Regional Innovation Fund.
There are also opportunities aligned with UK Government 2025 Industrial Strategy's eight primary sectors, particularly between Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy and Digital and Technologies, and the increased role that universities will play in driving and delivering regional growth.
Cardiff Health Partners is uniquely positioned to deliver on the government's ambition to accelerate innovation and regional and national growth in Life Sciences, and to capitalise on areas where the partners already have a competitive advantage and are beginning to lead the way.
