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Our 2026 discussion paper sets out UCL's capabilities and ambitions for health over the next 10+ years.
“Our vision is to prevent ill health, intercept disease before it takes hold, and improve outcomes when it does.
Read Shaping UCL's Health Vision
Our success depends on our position at the heart of one of Europe’s largest academic-health ecosystems. Through this paper, we’re inviting all our stakeholders – NHS partners, policymakers, UCL colleagues, funders, industry and international partners – to review, and contribute to, our ideas.
We are asking you to challenge our thinking, identify gaps, help us prioritise, and suggest how new collaborations could advance our vision. Your responses will help us to shape UCL’s Health Vision, our broader Academic Strategy, and how we bring them to life. By working together, we can speed up the path from discovery to patient benefit, prevent more disease, improve more treatments and strengthen the health system for everyone.
We’ll be engaging with our partners and stakeholders over the coming months to gather diverse input on the vision set out in this paper. If you’d like to contribute, please email our Health Partnerships Team.
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Helping to shape the way forward
UCL has built world-leading capability across multiple areas of health research. Our work spans all 11 faculties and is supported by partnerships with multiple NHS trusts.
In cancer, breakthroughs include immunotherapy, lung cancer screening and precision therapies. In neuroscience, we’ve pioneered work in dementia prevention, Huntington’s disease, stroke treatment and Parkinson's diagnosis. In eye health, our gene therapies are restoring sight in children. And we currently conduct 49% of the UK's academic advanced therapy trials, with our research leading to breakthrough gene therapies now in clinical use.
Alongside this vital work, UCL is also a global leader in population health, and well placed to support the NHS 10-Year Health Plan's three shifts – from analogue to digital, sickness to prevention, and hospital to community.
We’ve been at the forefront of shaping national and international discussion on prevention and health equity, through high-profile research and policy initiatives such as the Marmot Reviews. We also host five of the NIHR’s Policy Research Units and five WHO Collaborating Centres to translate our health research into national and global policy.
Leading research from discovery to translation
In this paper, we’re exploring four major areas where we see most opportunity to build on our potential in targeted areas of research:
- Computational Healthcare Institute: a cross-faculty institute, to help us coordinate and translate AI, data science and high-performance computing into routine NHS care
- Disease interception: progressing our work to detect and intervene in pre-disease processes to prevent illness before it takes hold. Our initial focus is on lung cancer, brain cancer, foetal medicine and dementia
- Advanced Genomic Therapies Centre: supercharging UCL’s world-leading clinical translation capabilities to solve major health challenges and accelerate the translational pathway from discovery through to clinical success and commercialisation
- Integrated solutions to health challenges: drawing on UCL’s interdisciplinary strengths across all 11 faculties, through our Health of the Public initiative.
Brain cancer research provides a compelling example of how these opportunities could converge
Supporting the NHS and extending UCL’s health expertise globally
We’re also keen to support the NHS in new ways to build the skilled workforce it needs. And we’re looking for ways to extend UCL’s health expertise globally, working with UCL departments to identify new educational opportunities.
Four key initiatives being explored include:
- A new School of Health Professional Education for allied health professionals, nurses, midwives and healthcare scientists
- The opportunity to launch a modern dental undergraduate programme, addressing ‘dental deserts’
- International growth and greater global impact through partnerships with Tsinghua University and a Dubai hub
- Expanded health consulting in international medical and health education, health economics, and health systems.