The Babraham Institute is a centre for discovery research in human biology with a view to understanding how our bodies work and what changes with age and disease. As a pioneering fundamental life science institute, our overarching aims are to understand the human biology that underpins health. Our research provides the bedrock for interventions that promote health and tackle age-related decline, thereby maximising heath span – the numbers of years lived in good health.
Our 20 research groups, grouped by area of focus into three research programmes: epigenetics, signalling and immunology, possess expertise in defining the molecular and cellular details that determine cell identity, human development, the effect of diet on health through epigenetic mechanisms, how our immune systems develop and respond to threats, the effect of age on the function of the immune system, protein quality control, the biology of protein aggregation, cellular recycling and cellular fitness.
Ongoing research in specific pioneering areas includes:
The research of the Institute is underpinned by eight cutting-edge scientific facilities. The equipment and the expertise of the facility teams enable our researchers to ‘think big’, taking new approaches to make discoveries and advance our knowledge of biology. We have a tradition of pioneering new research techniques that take science forward.
Our work provides the foundation for more applied, commercial bioscience. Our co-location with the 60 life science companies on the Babraham Research Campus provides the perfect environment for entrepreneurship, collaboration and innovation as we work to accelerate the application of our discoveries for societal benefit. Our partnerships with academic and commercial bioscientists allow better science to happy more efficiently on both sides. In addition to joining the Institute’s community, a journalist in residence would also have exposure to the campus community, exploring knowledge exchange at the interface of academic and commercial research.
The Institute has a long history of discovery research and our research is classed as internationally leading. Our 20 research groups, working across three themes, bring curiosity, bold scientific ambition and expertise to undertake pioneering discovery research. Our approach focuses on cellular and molecular biology working in several model systems (fruit flies, nematode worms, cell cultures, mice, human samples). This research is enabled by the Institute’s cutting-edge scientific facilities (bioinformatics, biological chemistry, biological support unit (small animal unit), flow cytometry, gene targeting, genomics, imaging, mass spectrometry) and achieved by innovation from our research teams who develop techniques to provide novel biological insights.
Our findings advance our understanding of human biology and generates the essential biological knowledge that provides the platform for lifestyle and healthcare interventions.
Scientific progress has driven incredible advances in recent centuries and life expectancies are higher than ever before. Yet improvement in healthy life span – the time when we’re still fit and active, often called health span – has been minimal. Almost 1 in 5 people in the UK are now over 65 years old and that proportion is rising. By studying how cells in our body specialise, regulate their genes, communicate and defend themselves against illness, we hope to gain insights into why we age, why some of us age faster than others and how we can stay healthy for longer.
The biology of ageing is generally not well understood, so we take a fundamental approach to understanding how our bodies change as we age. It’s not yet possible to directly intervene in the human ageing process. Instead, we use a combination of cell culture, animal models, organoids, and computational models to examine and understand the basic principles of biological ageing.
Many major illnesses including cancer, diabetes and heart disease become more common with age. Older people are also much more prone to contagious diseases such as flu. By understanding ageing, we can lay the foundations for ways to revitalise ageing systems in our bodies, which could greatly reduce the number of cases of diseases like these and many others.