Improving the health of people across the world

Help make vital healthcare discoveries and get to those who need them – faster.

Birmingham is where big healthcare breakthroughs are made, from the first liver transplant to inventing the pacemaker. As we strive to make cutting-edge discoveries in diseases from cancer to COVID-19, we want to ensure everyone around the world has access to good healthcare, from safe, affordable surgery to support for mothers and babies. And when the next healthcare emergency hits, we want to be ready, whether that is another pandemic or the day when our antibiotics don’t work anymore against infectious diseases.

What you can do

You can help the expert teams at Birmingham take action on these challenges and make vital discoveries faster. Current projects include: 

• Birmingham has made many breakthroughs in specific types of cancers; while continuing targeted discoveries, our next step is to bring all this expertise together to find where a treatment or test for one kind of cancer might help for another. 
• COVID-19 showed us the impact new infectious diseases can have if we are not ready for them – and with existing diseases becoming resistant to antibiotics, one of the known ones could become highly dangerous again. Our work includes a diagnostic suitcase in a lab, which can identify new diseases early so they can be contained while new treatments are rapidly developed. 
• The pandemic nearly shut down every operating room in the world, but Birmingham researchers found a way to continue surgery safely. Now we want to use what we learned to prevent infection from other diseases during surgery, and to increase the number of surgeons in developing countries, where many people never get to the top of the waiting lists or can’t afford to join them in the first place. 
• Every day, around 800 women and 12,000 new-borns die because of complications with pregnancy and childbirth. We are figuring out the causes and better ways to address miscarriage, caesareans, stillbirths and blood loss during labour. 

How you can help

You could support the experts, the equipment and the laboratories needed to bring new insights to critical healthcare challenges.

For example, much of the work in labs is done by clinical PhD students, many of whom studied their degrees at Birmingham. £53,332 each year (plus 25% Gift Aid) for three years could help them make the next big discovery. The student you support will share their progress with you and invite you to the lab.

To start a conversation about how you could support a PhD student, fund vital equipment or even build a laboratory, just get in touch.