Bioscience for an Integrated Understanding of Health is a strategic challenge which provides research and innovation funding to improve the health and wellbeing of animals and humans across the life course, with broad benefits to society and the economy.
Bioscience for an Integrated Understanding of Health (BIUH) aims to provide a deep, integrated understanding of the fundamental biological mechanisms of healthy systems across the life course. It promotes ‘One Health’ and 3Rs (replacement, reduction and refinement) approaches to improve human and animal health and wellbeing.
The BIUH Strategic Research and Innovation Framework expands upon BBSRC’s strategic delivery plan and sets out a collective research and innovation roadmap for bioscience and biotechnology to help address health challenges in the UK and globally.
It outlines our mission, aims, strategic drivers and how our investments and activities will enable the delivery of wider benefit and impact. The framework highlights four key themes:
- Ageing and health across the life course: advancing the understanding of biological mechanisms of ageing and maintaining cognitive, mental and physical health and wellbeing across the lifespan
- Food and nutrition for health: advancing the understanding of how the components and nutrients of food and diet, as well as their interactions and consumption patterns promote health across the life course
- Combatting infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR): understanding, forecasting, avoiding and mitigating animal infectious diseases and AMR to improve the health and wellbeing of animals and people
- Transformative technologies for health: developing, validating, implementing and applying tools, technologies, methodologies and data to understand and manage the health and wellbeing of animals and humans across the life course
These themes are underpinned by two guiding approaches:
- One Health: an integrated, transdisciplinary approach that addresses the health of people, animals, plants and the environment as closely linked and interdependent
- the 3Rs (replacement, refinement and reduction): minimising the use of animals and enhancing animal welfare
BBSRC’s portfolio uniquely bridges:
- healthy human systems
- the food systems which influence nutritional outcomes
- animal health and welfare research
- infectious disease emergence and spread
Whilst research focused on human diseases falls outside of BBSRC’s scientific remit, we work in partnership with other funders, organisations and stakeholders to maximise the value of shared research objectives and knowledge between studies of human health and animal health, welfare and disease.
We aim to achieve this through comparative ‘one biology’ approaches, and a ‘One Health’ approach to zoonosis research.