Dr Michael Wright is a consultant clinical geneticist and joint medical director at Newcastle Hospitals. He trained as a paediatrician, working across the UK and United States, becoming the trust’s medical director in 2024. Michael continues to work clinically within The Northern Genetics Service, based at Life, as a paediatric geneticist.
I have worked at Life since the day it opened and every time I come here, I am very proud of what we have achieved.
I think it’s typified by the fact that over the last 25 years we have used the information that has come out of the research with colleagues in Newcastle University, many of them based here, and also with colleagues elsewhere, in the hospitals in Newcastle and also across the country, to improve healthcare for patients with heritable disease and also now for patients with more common disease as well.
That was one of the underlying principles of Life when it was established – that we would bring together people from lots of different backgrounds, from lots of different organisations and from many different countries across the world.
One of the great achievements of Life has been that multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary approach to both research and clinical care, and that idea of bringing research and clinical care together is something which has been enormously important to the success of this site.
Through this collaboration between researchers and clinicians, we’ve moved from a situation where when I first started here, most of what we were able to do was to help people understand the underlying cause of the conditions that they had, to a situation where we are able to help people with specific treatments for those conditions.
On the Life site there are a number of different services for NHS patients.
We have the Newcastle Fertility Centre, we have the Genomics Diagnostics Laboratory, the Clinical Genetics Service and the John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre.
Each of those do slightly different things for different groups of people in the North East and across the country.
The Fertility Centre is there to help couples who find it impossible or difficult to have children and we have seen the amazing work that colleagues in the fertility centre have done, particularly around families who have mitochondrial disease.
The Genomics Diagnostics Laboratory is there to provide molecular diagnosis for people with inherited or heritable conditions and recently, and more commonly now, common diseases including cancer.
The collaboration between the Genomics Diagnostic Laboratory and laboratories elsewhere in the country, has really helped improve quality of life and outcomes for patients.
The Clinical Genetics Service use the information that’s generated by the diagnostics laboratory to help patients and their families both in understanding the underlying cause of the conditions but also, more and more now, are helping to manage their treatment to improve outcomes for patients with those conditions.
The John Walton Centre has led the way both nationally and on a world level in developing understanding of the muscular dystrophy broad group of conditions affecting muscle function and we have used that information to improve both care for patients and increasingly to develop specific treatments.
They have fundamentally changed the way in which patients with muscular dystrophies can view their future and really improve not just the short-term quality of life but long-term outcomes for patients with those conditions.
It’s very easy for us to look back as Life reaches its 25th birthday – for me it’s much more important that we look forward.
And I look forward to the next five, 10 and indeed 25 years with huge optimism both as someone who has worked here for the last 25 years but also as one of the medical directors of Newcastle Hospitals. Because we think this site is a really important part of the future of healthcare and scientific research in Newcastle.