On 1 April 2015, the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) became part of the new Francis Crick Institute.

The Crick is a consortium of six of the UK's most successful scientific and academic organisations - the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King's College London.

Researchers from NIMR transferred to the Crick on 1 April 2015, but will be based at their existing location in Mill Hill, London, until they transfer to the new institute in early 2016.

As part of the National Institute for Medical Research, the Leprosy Committee of the Tropical Medicine Research Board emerged from the Leprosy Subcommittee of Colonial Medical Research Committee (CMRC). The origins of leprosy work at the National Institute for Medical Research can be traced to Robert Cochrane’s 1949 proposal for a Leprosy Subcommittee of the Colonial Medical Research Council. This proposal was titled "Memorandum on the Organisation of a Basic Research Unit in Leprosy with the Department of Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Oct 1951 and Proposal for Field Research Units." In 1963, the Council was advised in the field of leprosy research by its Leprosy Committee (formerly a sub-committee of the Colonial Medical Research Committee) under the chairmanship of Sir John Boyd.

In 1963, Dr Dick Rees reported on the difficulties of leprosy research at the Medical Research Council: Tropical Medicine Research Board that "The continuing failure to culture the human leprosy bacillus in vitro or to transmit the infection to experimental animals as a routine procedure has seriously restricted the scope of both fundamental and applied research in leprosy. Even the simplest, though basically essential, laboratory techniques for studying an infectious disease cannot be used in leprosy. For example, it is impossible to prepare a specific vaccine against leprosy or to test in vitro for chemotherapeutically active drugs. Unfortunately, progress of research in leprosy has been limited, particularly because work in this field has been undertaken by personnel with inadequate training in research methods."

In October 1981, the Laboratory for Leprosy and Mycobacterial Research described the work they did in the following way:

"The majority of work in the laboratory deals with the pathogenesis, immunology, chemotherapy and biochemistry of leprosy. Much of this work is done in our role as a WHO Collaborative Centre of Reference and Research on M leprae, with great involvement in WHO programmes on immunology (IMMLEP) and therapy (THELEP) of leprosy. Although leprosy was one of the first human diseases shown to be caused by a bacterium it is still impossible to grow the organism in vitro, unlike almost all other known disease-causing agents. Unfortunately, as with many bacterial infections, drug resistant strains are emerging and trials are in progress to determine the drug/drugs to treat these. This necessitates the use of animal models to study the efficacy of drug treatments on some of the millions of leprosy sufferers in the world.

"However, biochemical studies aimed at determining the metabolism of the bacteria are being pursued and may lead to a method of in vitro culture, while some of the immunological studies being undertaken could lead to methods of early detection (and hence treatment before too much damage is done) or prevention (a vaccine)."