Director's statement: Working with researchers

This 'Annual Review' illustrates some of the many ways in which the work we support or carry out ourselves is making a difference.

This year's stories of the discovery and application of new knowledge illustrate how outstanding researchers are gaining insight into biological processes at all scales, from the atomic structure of medically important proteins to the global impact and treatment of malaria. Our understanding of the human genome continues to grow, with yet another surprising discovery from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute - that genetic variation between individuals is far higher than previously thought.

Genetics has benefited enormously from high-throughput sequencing and other technologies, which have transformed the way research is carried out. Structural biology is less easy to scale up, but the Structural Genomics Consortium has made excellent progress in its production of structures of medically important proteins, and many valuable discoveries are being made about protein function on the basis of structural information.

Such studies complement research into the threats to health we face in this country and globally. The global impact of malaria, for example, is now much clearer. Wellcome Trust-funded researchers are world leaders in the fight against this insidious disease.

Application of new knowledge has seen trials of new dipstick diagnostic tests for trachoma, trials of new vaccines and diagnostics for tuberculosis, and trials for new treatments for the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Research we have funded has led to both national and international changes in health policy. The World Health Organization now recommends artemisinin combination therapies for treatment of malaria and the Kenyan Ministry of Health is continuing its Hib immunisation programmes.

Partnerships

We can only achieve this kind of impact through working closely with the research community. Through supporting the best people with the best ideas and providing flexible funding, we hope to support the generation of new knowledge to underpin future discoveries and their subsequent application.

A key issue for all funding agencies is to balance bottom-up and top-down approaches to the support of research. Who drives the process of discovery? Who asks the research questions? Is it the researchers or the funding agencies? We take a flexible approach, and have an open door for the best researchers to bring us their best ideas. However, we also work with the research community to identify areas where there is unmet research need and to provide catalysis to ensure that vital research is not overlooked.

Last year we introduced Strategic Awards to ensure we could support the best ideas wherever they are found. The scope of these awards is really only limited by the imagination of the research community. This year we made our first three awards, providing outstanding research groups with significant and flexible support:

• Professors Austin Smith and Fiona Watt were awarded £7 million to establish an international centre of excellence in fundamental stem cell research. The Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge will explore the genetic and biochemical mechanisms that control how stem cells develop into particular types of cells.
• Professors Ray Dolan and Karl Friston, at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, received an award of 6.7m. This will enhance their research programme into the neural basis of human cognition, work that is extending our understanding of common neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia and dementia.
• Professor Paul Luzio received a £4m award for the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. The Institute explores the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms behind disease and it has led key research into how viruses evade our immune system, genetic susceptibility to diabetes, and progress towards novel treatments for Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease.

Our strategy will continue to create a framework that can support, but not constrain, those that look to us for funding. Our Strategy Committees are key to helping us identify our future research priorities and this year we published an 'à la carte' menu of areas identified as important for future research activity. To ensure we can support the best people, our portfolio of careers schemes has been reviewed and a number of new schemes were launched this year. The new Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards, worth £250 000 over four years, will allow researchers unprecedented freedom early in their careers to pursue their own research. Our new Flexible Travel Awards will also support collaboration-building and the transfer of ideas and skills through support for sabbaticals and travelling fellowships. Other new initiatives were also launched this year, notably the £91m Seeding Drug Discovery initiative, aiming to provide funding for the early stages of drug discovery, which often struggle to attract funding for commercial development. We hope this initiative will create a stronger synergy between academia and industry and capitalise on the powerful resources that are spread across the academic, biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors.

In areas of unmet research need, such as drug discovery, a key role for the Trust is acting as a catalyst, bringing together partners to help tackle pressing research problems. Public-private partnerships are an effective model for developing new drugs for important but hitherto neglected diseases and we have formed a number this year.

We have formed an alliance with the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases, the Economic Development Board of Singapore and the Medicines for Malaria Venture to jointly initiate research on malaria drug discovery. Malaria continues to kill millions of people around the world and this new partnership will investigate the potential for development of new treatments from existing compounds that have already shown antimalarial activity, and from novel compounds. I hope this initiative will produce the next generation of drugs to treat malaria.

A new alliance was also formed between the Wellcome Trust, The Institute of Cancer Research and GlaxoSmithKline to discover, develop and commercialise novel small-molecule inhibitors of BRAF, a key signal transduction enzyme, for use as anticancer agents. Creative approaches to the discovery of new medicines like this are vital to help society address the growing burden of disease.

Improving healthcare for patients was the aim of a further consortium formed this year. This consortium, led by the Wellcome Trust, provided £84m to boost experimental medicine in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. This major investment aims to develop and strengthen Clinical Research Facilities, which bring together laboratory and clinical patient-based research in order to answer important questions about health and disease. Under the umbrella of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, this initiative brought together the major health research charities, the government funding bodies and health departments.

A research funder's work does not end with the award of a grant. What matters is what is discovered and that knowledge about these discoveries can be freely accessed around the world.

This year we led a major new initiative, with a nine-strong group of UK research funders, to establish an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. UK PubMed Central, a partnership between the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the University of Manchester, will allow everyone with access to the internet to access a vast collection of biomedical research at the touch of a button, promoting the free transfer of ideas in a bid to speed up scientific discovery.

I hope that this Annual Review illustrates our excitement about the outcomes and impacts of the work that we support. Our doors are open to excellent researchers with excellent ideas.

Mark Walport
Director
January 2007