Translational medicine, personalised healthcare and public health

Health research at Exeter addresses important clinical issues through basic and clinical science, clinical trials, policy and regulation, and health services research.

The University has a breadth of internationally rated research funded by organisations such as the Medical Research Council, the Department of Health, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

The research encompasses:

• health and clinical psychology
• exercise sciences
• sociology
• biophysics
• bioengineering
• bioinformatics

Main focus areas

Diabetes, obesity and height

Scientists at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry led by Andrew Hattersley made major breakthroughs in identifying and treating new forms of diabetes and in discovering new genes related to height and obesity. The team won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2005 for their pioneering work on identifying and treating monogenic diabetes.Funds raised from alumni helped the team of scientists to continue their vital gene research.

Monogenic diabetes

Professor Andrew Hattersley and his team worked to understand the precise genetic mutations which cause diabetes in individual patients and found that this can have a marked effect on the type of treatment required.

In particular, they have shown that drugs which are effective in patients with the normal form of Type 2 diabetes could be four times more effective in patients with the most common genetic form of monogenic diabetes. This has enabled hundreds of patients to take tablets to control their diabetes and released them from the requirement to inject insulin.

Their latest work has centred on children diagnosed with diabetes in the first six months of life. The Exeter team have found four new genetic causes of this type of diabetes and importantly more than 50 per cent of these children can swap their insulin injections for sulphonylurea tablets and get better blood sugar control.

The obesity gene

The same Peninsula Medical School team identified the FTO gene as the most clear genetic link yet to obesity in the general population.

Working with colleagues at the University of Oxford, they first identified this genetic link to obesity through a genomewide study testing 500,000 genetic variants in 5,000 people and going on to confirm the result by testing a further 30,000 people. The study found that people with two copies of a variant of the FTO gene have a 70 per cent higher risk of being obese and had 3kg of additional fat compared to people with no copies.

The height gene

Professor Tim Frayling’s team has identified the first gene in which a common variant directly influences height.

The difference in height between a person carrying two copies of the variant and a person carrying none is just under 1cm in height, so does not on its own explain the range of heights across the population. It is likely that this is just the first of many genes that will be found to have an effect on height.

The research involved staff from the Peninsula Medical School working with colleagues at the University of Oxford, MIT and Harvard.

Smoking, walking and psychology

Exeter exercise and health scientists have shown that short bouts of walking can reduce cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

This on-going experimental work has implications for promoting physical activity (that is not vigorous or of long duration) to prevent and treat excessive desire and the urge to engage in other pleasure seeking and addictive behaviours such as eating high energy food (eg, chocolate), consuming alcohol, and gambling.

The research group is led by Professor Adrian Taylor and funded by the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the Department of Health, and others as part of the National Prevention Research Initiative.

Searching for a drug-free alternative to treating depression

A team from the University of Exeter’s Mood Disorders Centre is testing whether a new therapy treatment could be a viable alternative to anti-depressants.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was developed by a team of psychologists five years ago to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression. It helps people understand and recognise their depression and it has already been shown among people who are very vulnerable to recurring depression that it helps stop depressed moods from spiralling out of control into a full episode of depression.

Now for the first time researchers in Exeter are comparing the effectiveness of MBCT with drug treatments to see if it could be a viable alternative to long-term anti-depressant treatment.

To read more about their latest research results, see the news story: 'New treatment hope for people with recurring depression'.