The Wellcome Trust Biocentre at the University of Dundee has received a major strategic award in integrated biosciences, totalling £3.5 million from The Wellcome Trust.
The award will enable the Biocentre to purchase the latest "state-of-the-art" equipment including the Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorters needed to separate different types of living cells from one another, the most advanced and powerful light microscopes for studying the detailed architecture of living cells, and a second X-ray diffractometer to solve the structures of proteins in atomic detail. The award will also fund the salaries of the operators and other key support staff.
Welcoming the award, Professor Sir Philip Cohen, the Director of the Wellcome Trust Biocentre said "This is a major endorsement of the important research being carried out at the University of Dundee. It recognises the key advances in the development and exploitation of light microscopy carried out by Dr Jason Swedlow and Professor Angus Lamond, and the outstanding teams in protein structure determination that are led by Professor Bill Hunter, Dr Daan van Aalten and Dr Charlie Bond. Part of the award is linked to the recruitment of another world leading cancer researcher to the Biocentre that we will be announcing next month. These latest awards, coupled with others over the past two years, such as the Post-Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre opened in May by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, means that the equipment available to researchers in the Wellcome Trust Biocentre is virtually unrivalled in Europe and now among the very best in the world".
Contact Angela Nicol 01382 348377
Notes for Editors
The Wellcome Trust Biocentre at the University of Dundee in Tayside, opened
in 1997 and is one of the world's leading institutes for biomedical
research, comprising over 450 scientists from 51 different countries
working in over 50 research teams. The major goals of the Biocentre are to
understand the causes for many diseases and conditions including allergies,
arthritis, cancer, diabetes, genetic disorders, heart disease, skin
diseases, hypertension and stroke, as well as tropical diseases such as
malaria and sleeping sickness. Some of this work has now reached the stage
where it is being exploited to develop improved drugs to treat these
diseases.
The Wellcome Trust is an independent research-funding charity established
under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936. It is funded from a private
endowment which is managed with long-term stability and growth in mind. The
Trust's mission is to promote research with the aim of improving human and
animal health.