Trust renews support for centres

30 August 2010

Our Strategic Award Committee recently renewed funding for a number of our best-known Centres. The Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh was awarded £5 million over five years to continue its work into the molecular principles that underlie cellular function.

Professor David Tollervey will replace Prof. Adrian Bird as Director there in 2011. The Wellcome Trust-Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, which promotes research at the interface of developmental biology and cancer biology, was awarded £10m funding over five years.

Researchers there study normal animal development, including cell differentiation, morphogenesis and cell proliferation, and aim to understand how cancers may develop when these processes fail.

We awarded just under £8m over five years to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London and its Director, Prof. Ray Dolan. Plans include the development of a model-based framework to better address fundamental questions in systems neuroscience and the breakdowns in function that characterise common neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

With the Medical Research Council’s Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board, we approved the renewal of core funding for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, at a total of £6m over three years.

Running for nearly 20 years, the study has collected, among other information, genome-wide data from over 20 000 mothers, children and fathers.

Image: X-ray of normal and transgenic mice. Credit: Wellcome Images