Director's statement: A YEAR OF DISCOVERY

One of the greatest satisfactions of directing the Wellcome Trust is seeing the many discoveries emerging from the research we fund. The most effective way to fund the research that leads to new discoveries is to support the best researchers, the best teams and the best ideas. To help guide our research communities and provide them with the opportunities to make real progress, this year we launched our Strategic Plan 2005–2010: Making a Difference.

The new Plan is about creating a framework, a set of high-level principles to guide – but not constrain – research communities that look to us for funding. The Strategic Plan will be a living document, allowing us to adjust our direction as new opportunities arise. Key to this will be flexibility in our mechanisms for awarding grants. This year we launched a Strategic Awards scheme, with grants that will enable us to fund strategic initiatives of many kinds in a timely manner. We also broadened our UK eligibility criteria, so that we can fund the best scientists throughout the UK and enable them to collaborate with scientists worldwide.

Discoveries

Support of curiosity-driven research remains the biggest single element of our funding portfolio. Such support has led to some outstanding research outputs – discoveries that give us a better understanding of health and disease.

Last year Dr Georgy Koentges and colleagues made ground-breaking steps forward in the understanding of how our skeletons and muscles develop, and why certain genetic disorders affect particular parts of our bodies. This has significantly altered our view of a key biological process, as has the work of Professor Adrian Hayday and colleagues at King's College London. They have discovered that immature T cells have a crucial role in generating special defence cells that patrol the vulnerable sites exposed to the outside world, such as skin and the gut. This has created a new view of the thymus function.

In the clinical arena, this year saw the results of the largest-ever clinical trial on the treatment of severe malaria. This work in South-east Asia, led by Professor Nick White, brought calls for immediate change to medication practices.

In Vietnam, Dr Jeremy Farrar and colleagues have advanced our understanding of avian influenza in humans. Their research suggests that the virus can affect many parts of the body – not just the lungs, as previously thought. The core funding of the Vietnam Programme and our other Major Overseas Programmes in Kenya and Thailand was renewed this year. Funding of £26 million was agreed in recognition of the internationally important work these Programmes are carrying out.

In the UK, researchers working with ALSPAC, a cohort study of 14 000 children born in the Avon area in 1991–92 and their parents, which we fund jointly with the Medical Research Council, continue to produce important findings.

Research resources

The year also saw the fruit of several large international collaborative projects, in which the Trust is a major partner. These build on the Human Genome Project, aiming to translate genome sequence data to give a better understanding of health and disease.

The International HapMap Consortium published a detailed catalogue of human genetic variation, which is already accelerating the search for genes involved in common diseases. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute played a key role in generating this map. In another outstanding year, the Sanger Institute took a key role in international partnerships that sequenced the genomes of parasites causing three major diseases in developing countries – sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis – and the human X chromosome.

Knowing the shape of a protein is crucial for understanding its biological function, and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public–private partnership between the Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKline, and funding agencies in Canada and Sweden, is determining the three-dimensional structures of proteins relevant to human disease. The SGC has, to date, solved the structures of over 100 complex proteins, including important drug development targets for malaria and diabetes.

These are tremendous research resources, all freely available to researchers around the globe. Last year we also agreed to fund another such community resource. The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium will be one of the biggest projects ever undertaken to identify the genetic variations that may predispose people to, or protect them from, 11 major diseases, including type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

Practical application

Key to our mission is ensuring that research knowledge results in health benefit. CardioDigital Limited, a spinout company from Napier University, Edinburgh, has developed and is piloting software that can significantly enhance the information extracted from existing medical hardware, such as pulse oximeters.

Professor Steve Howdle, Professor Vladimir Popov and colleagues have developed 'PolyHap' implants, which have been used by surgeons to help rebuild the faces of children injured in accidents or born with serious defects. This has already benefited a baby with a jaw tumour and a 12-year-old girl who had been barely able to open her mouth from birth.

Dr Mary Moran at the London School of Economics and Political Science published an excellent analysis showing that public–private partnerships (PPPs) have performed better than either sector working alone when it comes to delivering safe, effective, affordable drugs for neglected diseases.

We awarded one such non-profit PPP, the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), £10 million in funding – matched by the UK Department for International Development. MMV runs the world's largest dedicated programme of antimalarial drug research and development.

A supportive environment

To achieve our mission, we need a climate within which biomedical research can flourish. The Trust has again been active in this area.

The completion of the National Science Learning Centre is an important step forward. It will provide teachers and other educators with access to the resources and expertise to get to grips with the complexities of contemporary science. In turn, teachers will go on to inspire today's young people to become the scientists of tomorrow, and give them the confidence to understand, debate and question issues surrounding science.

This year we have again been actively engaging with Government, policy makers and opinion formers on issues affecting the research base. These include stem cell research, use of human tissues, career structures for clinical and basic scientists, and continuing professional development for science teachers. We have also actively promoted the 'open access' model of science publishing, to help ensure that research findings are shared as widely and as rapidly as possible.

As this Annual Review illustrates, our funding portfolio is a treasure trove of stories of discovery. Capturing these stories systematically is not easy, and understanding the longer-term impacts of research is particularly difficult. The research process is incremental, and the road from discovery to application can be long and complex. We plan to develop new ways to capture the diverse outputs and outcomes of our many awards. Through this approach we hope to gain a better picture of how, through the work of our many dedicated grantholders, we are truly making a difference.