WORLD-leading research into heart disease in Oxford has received a £6m boost from the British Heart Foundation.

The charity has given the money to University of Oxford British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence, based at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

Unlike most research grants, the money is not ring-fenced to a particular experiment and means the researchers can test new ideas.

Heart disease is one of the biggest killers in the UK. The team will continue to discover the causes and establish new treatments.

The centre was established in 2008 following an £8.4m award from the British Heart Foundation. It now has 48 academics leading about 300 researchers at sites across the city.

The new grant will fund research over five years, and was the largest part of £8m of new funding given by the charity to the University of Oxford to conduct research.

The centre requires about £45m funding a year, which it receives from the British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research.

Professor Hugh Watkins, centre director, said: “This money is fundamentally important because of its flexibility. It is only a few per cent of the total funding we need each year, but its value is far, far greater than that because it does allow us to chase down those exciting opportunities at the moment they arise.

“If you want to look at a new idea or test some new exciting hypothesis, you always need some evidence that it is a successful idea before you can get large amounts of funding for research.

“With this money, we can do blue-sky ideas.

“Heart disease will always be one of the major reasons that people die, but if we can make it later in life with less burden we have achieved a lot. That is happening but we have a long way to go.”

The money will also be used to encourage new researchers and draw in others from seperate disciplines, such as maths and computer science, to bring new ideas to the table.

The centre investigates three broad aspects of heart disease, the patient-based research looking at family history, population studies looking at conditions and treatments and the study of individual cells.

It has already made progress discovering genes that cause heart diseases, developing MRI scanners and conducting “mega trials”, of 10,000 people at once, into conditions and treatments.

One of its biggest successes was in a form of genetic heart disease that causes sudden death of young people.

British Heart Foundation associate medical director Professor Jeremy Pearson said: “With the best and brightest minds on the job, we’ll be even closer to a world where people don’t die prematurely from heart disease.”