28 January 2013
Topping out ceremony for £12.5m Life Sciences Centre
PHOTO/INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY:
1.30pm, Wednesday January 30th,
Sir James Black Centre
College of Life Sciences,
Old Hawkhill
(Please note parking is limited near to the site. If you are planning to attend please do try and let us know in advance - contact details below)
Funders and stakeholders who are helping develop the £12.5 million Centre for Translational and Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Dundee will see how the building is progressing at a topping-out ceremony on Wednesday January 30th.
Work on the new Centre began in July and is scheduled to finish in November 2013. The CTIR will enhance Life Sciences capacity, including in drug discovery - an area in which Dundee is already the leading University in the UK and one of the foremost academia-based centres in the world.
Around 200 new research jobs in Life Sciences will be added once the CTIR is complete, adding to the 1000-plus scientists, research students and support staff from 62 countries in already working in the College of Life Sciences in Dundee.
"The build on the CTIR is progressing well and we are excited about how it will enhance our capabilities across key areas of research," said Professor Michael Ferguson, Dean of Research in the College of Life Sciences.
"We are extremely grateful to the organisations who have generously supported this major investment in what we are doing at Dundee.
"This facility will help further develop the already very strong drug discovery programmes we have in the area of neglected tropical diseases - including African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), Leishmaniasis, Chagas' Disease, tuberculosis and malaria - which are producing strong candidates for drug development. We expect to see these leading to effective drugs for at least one of these diseases.
"We are also addressing other unmet medical needs which affect millions of people. What we aim to do is translate our basic research in areas like cancer and eczema, and other diseases, to produce chemical agents that can tackle these problems in an innovative way."
The CTIR will bring experimentalists into juxtaposition with biophysical and computational biology, breaking down the barriers between the scientific disciplines to facilitate innovative translation of biological and drug discovery research into new therapeutics.
The first (ground) floor will house a brand new High Throughput robotics and molecular pharmacology facility to augment the existing Drug Discovery Unit and to translate basic science into commercial and therapeutic opportunities. The second floor will house "Computational Biology", including Bioinformatics, Biophysics, Data Analysis and Software Development experts.
The project provides an exciting opportunity to bring these disciplines together, allowing contributions of scientists from a number of different fields, each bringing their expertise to bear on aspects of the larger, systems-level problems relating to biology and drug discovery and drug design.
The construction of the CTIR will cost about £12.5 million, helped enormously by a peer-reviewed Wellcome-Wolfson Capital Award in Biomedical Science of about £5 million, with matched funding by The University of Dundee.
The remainder has been raised thanks to the generous donations of Scottish funding agencies and charitable trusts.
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has also made a contribution towards a networking centre in the CTIR, thanks to the BBSRC Excellence with Impact Award won by the College of Life Sciences in 2011.
The front facade of the building will feature large anodised aluminium cladding panels incorporating artistic abstractions representative of four key scales of Life Science Research: Molecular, Organellar, Cellular and Tissue. The scientific images have been translated into artwork, to be perforated onto the panels, by Professor Elaine Shemilt and her team from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. In addition, the new Centre will contain a gallery for art-science projects.
Professor Ferguson said, "I am particularly pleased to be working with colleagues in our College of Art and Design. As well as bringing together scientific disciplines, the CTIR will also help bridge art and science disciplines - that has to be a good thing."
For further information, including video interviews, see: www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/other/ctir.
NOTES TO EDITORS
LIFE SCIENCES AT DUNDEE
With more than 1000 scientists, research students and support staff from 62 countries and external funding in excess of £35 million per year, the College of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee is one of the largest and most productive Life Sciences research institutes in Europe. Consistently voted one of 'the best places for a life scientist to work' by The Scientist magazine, the College has an international reputation for its basic and translational research and was recognised in the 2011 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Excellence with Impact Awards for 'Greatest Delivery of Impact'. The University of Dundee is the central hub for a multi-million pound biotechnology sector in the east of Scotland, which now accounts for 16% of the local economy. www.dundee.ac.uk.
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