Collaboration/cooperation with external institutions Activities of London Liaison

AMED opened its London Office on 1st February 2017 in London as a hub to strengthen collaboration with UK and the European countries in medical research and development, and it is renamed as London Liaison on 1 April 2022 and continues its activities. 

Both AMED and the Medical Research Council (MRC) support a wide range of medical R&D programmes across the spectrum from basic to applied research. AMED signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with the MRC on 1st February 2017, in which they agreed to work together to accelerate medical R&D through collaboration in the mutually-prioritised areas of infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, regenerative medicine, and dementia.

Since that time, AMED and the MRC have held several joint workshops and symposia in these fields, and they were pleased to launch joint calls for Japan-UK collaborative research projects in the fields of infectious disease research and regenerative medicine in 2019. In addition to their bilateral cooperation, AMED and the MRC are also both active members of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) , the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD), the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R), and the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR). Beyond these activities, the AMED London Office also organised events for Japan-UK research interaction focusing on themes around healthy ageing, biobanks and cohort studies.

A ceremony was held celebrating the continued scientific partnership and interaction in medical research between Japan and the UK on the 20th September 2019. The ceremony was attended by Professor Fiona Watt, Executive Chair of the MRC, Professor Rory Collins, CEO of the UK Biobank and many participants from across the research and industrial communities of the UK and Japan. It was a wonderful occasion to look back on the various collaborative achievements made by AMED with its UK partners, and to look towards an active continuation and further development of those partnerships in vital fields of medical research and development.