£14.9M awarded to MRC PPU

The Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit has had its funding for the next five years almost doubled to £14.9 million after an overwhelmingly positive assessment of its activities.

After a rigorous review, which involved the opinions of 30 international experts in the field, the MRC Council gave the highest possible 6.0 rating for the Unit's recent work and future proposals.

The MRC Council also approved a recommendation from its Physiological Systems and Clinical Sciences Board to provide an increased budget of £14.9 million over the five year period April 2007-2012. The Unit received funding of £7.5 million from 2002-2007.

"This major new commitment from the MRC to the Unit is a tremendous boost and recognises the pre-eminence we have achieved in this field worldwide," said Professor Sir Philip Cohen, Director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit.

"The additional funding will allow us to expand our cutting-edge research programmes, which aim to understand the causes of global diseases such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, hypertension and Parkinson's, and to use this information to facilitate the development of drugs to treat these conditions in partnership with the six major pharmaceutical companies with whom we collaborate."

The Council approved the appointment of Professor Dario Alessi as Deputy Director of the Unit.

Since being established in 1990, the MRC Unit has made major progress in research into cancer, diabetes, chronic inflammatory conditions and a range of other diseases. It led to the establishment of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy, a collaboration with some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, which received the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2006.

Over the past five years some of the highlights of the Unit's research have included the explanation of how a tumour suppressor called LKB1 prevents cancers from forming, the validation of the enzyme PDK1 as a key target for the development of an anti-cancer drug, the discovery of why mutations in an enzyme called WNK1 cause an inherited hypertension syndrome and the identification of new drug targets to treat chronic inflammatory diseases.