A pioneering trial is testing whether exercising before heart surgery can help patients recover faster and improve long-term outcomes. The CardioFit trial is delivered through the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). It is supported by the Heartbeat charity. Patients with cancer are already routinely offered ‘prehabilitation’ at University Hospital Southampton (UHS). The hospital is now breaking new ground by investigating its impact on patients with heart conditions. Structured...

Deliberately infecting volunteers to test new whooping cough vaccines has been shown to be safe in research. A team at University Hospital Southampton has developed a safe method of ‘controlled human infection’, where volunteers are infected with whooping cough bacteria without causing any illness. This can be used to study the infection in detail and to help develop and test new and improved vaccines. The researchers have shown that the method was safe, even when volunteers went home while...

Researchers have delivered the UK’s first dose in a new trial using an investigational mRNA vaccine to protect people against potential influenza pandemics such as avian flu (also known as ‘bird flu’). The research will assess the safety and immune response of an investigational mRNA-based A(H5) pandemic influenza vaccine candidate, mRNA-1018, commonly circulating in birds, with pandemic potential. The study is supported by the National Insititute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and...