Site Description

Moorfields, the largest ophthalmic healthcare provider in the world (800,000 patient attendances annually) with 30 hospital sites, provides eye care to circa 45% of London’s population. This encompasses a multiethnic and diverse group of patients including some of the most socially and economically deprived groups in the UK, served by a single integrated electronic medical record. The Trust provides tertiary and quaternary care to patients from across the UK and the world, giving rise to some of the most unique, highly enriched rare patient cohorts.

The public are more concerned about losing vision than losing their memory, speech and hearing, or suffering heart disease, and the impact of severe visual impairment on quality-of-life is comparable to intractable pain, severe stroke or end-stage cancer.

Moorfields hosts a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) in partnership with the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology as well as an NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF). The NIHR Moorfields CRF is the largest eye research facility in the world for early-phase studies and experimental medicine. Many BRC-funded research programmes develop new treatments which are then delivered within the CRF. 

The CRF is based at Moorfields’ largest hospital site (City Road, London) and has the largest number of Principal Investigators in UK with experience in ophthalmic clinical research. It is adjacent to the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology that houses the largest number of ophthalmic scientists in Europe. The combined research outputs of this partnership, supported through prior NIHR CRF and Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) awards, are ranked No.1 in independent world rankings. At the centre of the CRF is a 7,545 sq.ft ambulatory outpatient facility that houses 5 dedicated areas, including 26 patient examination rooms.

As ophthalmology is highly dependent on ocular imaging and visual function tests, there has been significant investment in these technologies. An associated specialist workforce is in place to deliver early-phase clinical trials with some prototype devices only available in a few centres globally. The centres’ imaging expertise and devices represent one of our greatest assets in attracting ongoing external investment and growing research. 

Capabilities

• Refraction, colour contrast, microperimetry, 3 optometry bays, 4 dark rooms for dark adapted visual fields and microperimetry; 3 light-controlled rooms for testing visual fields.
• Ocular Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT/OCTA) including industry prototypes; fluorescein/ICG angiography, 2 high-resolution adaptive optics prototypes for live real-time cellular level imaging and confocal microscopy.
• Intravitreal injections in clean rooms, infusions, laser treatment, surgimask for ocular biosampling and operating microscope.
• Blood and tissue processing, two -80°C freezers for biosample storage.
• BRC spin out and partner Meira GTx; GTx gene therapy vector Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) production facility delivers first in human gene therapies for inherited retinal diseases.