Our growing network

Our growing network

22nd November 2025

This month we welcomed professionals from the 16 NHS Trusts across the United Kingdom who make up our NHS Respiratory Metagenomic Network.

 

Together, alongside our partner organisations, we are working at pace to advance respiratory metagenomic testing across the NHS and it as fantastic to welcome them to St Thomas’ Hospital in London and witness the energy and commitment from colleagues and partner organisations.

During the day we heard from three of our network sites:

  • Simon Rock, Principal Scientist at North East Innovation Lab – part of Newcastle Hospitals, shared valuable insights on their experience of going through local validation of the test. They are our latest site to go live with a testing service for patients at The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust this winter.
  • Kordo Saeed, Consultant Microbiologist at University Hospital Southampton NHS FT, spoke about their pilot service and its benefits to patients.
  • Luke Blagdon Snell, Clinical Lecturer in Infectious Diseases at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, spoke about the ‘Route to Routine’ service at our lead site, sharing insights on the standardisation of clinical reporting and broader impact in hospital outbreak detection.

Throughout the day we also heard from:

  • Dr Adela Alcolea Medina and Dr Ronan Doyle from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Synnovis shared how iterative laboratory workflow improvements are taking place at pace, driven by the scale of our network. These improvements are helping advance clinical metagenomics in practice.
  • Dr Daniel Ward from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust provided a ‘Bioinformatics Download’, outlining the latest developments in the pipeline in place at all sites to provide standardised analysis, built for speed, accuracy and simplicity.
  • Dr Alexander Thompson from The University of Manchester, explored the health economics of Respiratory Metagenomics and innovative models to evaluate the value of complex clinical interventions

Huge thanks to everyone who joined us and contributed to the discussions.