Image: The doping facility was purposed built for the Games
The London 2012 anti-doping facilities will be developed after the Olympic and Paralympic Games into a world-class resource that could help revolutionise healthcare.
The medical facilities - purpose built for London 2012 - will be turned into the world's first MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, designed to enable researchers to explore the characteristics of disease in order to develop new drugs and treatments for patients.
The aim is to help develop better and more targeted treatment for patients by investigate the phenome patterns of patients and volunteers by analysing samples - usually blood or urine - very rapidly and on an unprecedented scale.
This will help researchers discover new 'biomarkers' to explain why one individual or population may be more susceptible to a disease than another. The knowledge will then aid scientists in finding new, safer and more targeted treatments.
The new Centre will be funded over five years by an investment of £5m each from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Health's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and will build on and develop the state-of-the-art equipment and expertise of the London 2012 anti-doping facilities provided by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline and operated by King's College London.
Health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "Our investment in this new Centre, the first of its kind, promises better targeted treatments for patients with a wide range of common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and dementia.
"Patients will benefit from faster and more accurate diagnosis and researchers will be able to develop new drugs and treatments as we understand more about the characteristics of diseases and new sub-types of diseases are discovered.
"Alongside our investment in genomics and gene-based centres, we will in coming years develop world-leading diagnostic capabilities."
