Imperial College (IC) is ranked the 3rd best University in Europe and 9th in the world overall. In June 2008 the UK Government published a report, “High Quality Care for All”, which set out its vision for the National Health Service (NHS) in England. The report included a commitment to develop a number of Academic Health Sciences Centers (AHSCs), with the purpose of translating scientific discoveries to specialist healthcare. In March 2009, Imperial College Healthcare became the UK's first AHSC. This created an institutional structure for translational research including the establishment of a dedicated and centrally resourced Tissue Bank for the integration of biobanking into clinical care. In 2011 the Imperial College Healthcare AHSC was designated a major trauma centre (MTC) specializing in neurological-trauma including traumatic brain injury (TBI). In 2011 the MTC at Imperial received 1807 Trauma Calls of which 702 received a head injury requiring neurosurgical consultation (912 in 2012). This provides a unique clinical service from which to identify biomarkers for the development of epilepsy following brain injury. In addition, Dr Michael Johnson and Dr Enrico Petretto at Imperial College will contribute bioinformatic and statistical analyses of gene expression datasets from across EPITARGET.

Dr. Michael Johnson is Deputy Head of the Centre for Clinical Translation in the Division of Brain Sciences, and Dr Enrico Petretto is group leader for computational biology. Their highly complementary expertise and proven ability to deliver scientific discovery published in high impact journals and the unique translational institutional infrastructure at Imperial provide a world class scientific environment for the relevant scientific tasks within WP1 and WP4 of EPITARGET.

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