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Prospects of a fillip for medical research rose this week after Britain’s
biggest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, announced its intention to
sell a large part of its stake in the pharmaceuticals company Wellcome,
maker of the AIDS drug zidovudine.

The trust’s investment in the company is currently worth £7.1
billion – about three-quarters of the company’s total value. By selling
about half of this the trust will raise at least £35 billion. Before
it can do so, however, it needs permission from the High Court to change
the will of its founder, Sir Henry Wellcome.

It is not yet clear how much of the new money will be available for
medical research, but Bridget Ogilvie, the trust’s director, said the move
‘has to be good news for scientists’. The trust expects to spend £100
million on research this year, compared with £55 million in the year
1990/1991. By comparison, the Medical Research Council will have a total
budget of £254 million next financial year; the Imperial Cancer Research
Fund and the Cancer Research Campaign last year spent £50 million
and £42 million.

Ogilvie says the trust will increase funds for training, for centres
of excellence and for neglected areas of research, particularly tropical
medicine. The trust has also decided to spend £800 000 a year for
three years on the neglected field of taxonomy and systematic biology. This
field, which includes, for example, the identification of disease-carrying
species of mosquitoes, was described last month by a committee of the House
of Lords as being at risk of extinction because of a shortage of funds.
Ogitive says the trust’s decision was not connected to the Lords’ report
but coincided with it. ‘We have been conscious that expertise in this field
is rapidly dying out,’ she says.

The trust wants to see more research into the basic science of malaria,
one of its traditional interests. The company has virtually ceased its research
in this field. ‘We think it is appropriate that we should finance this work,
because it is not a commercial area,’ says Ogilvie.

At present the trust funds centres of excellence in Glasgow, Cambridge
and London. It hints that there are likely to be more, although Ogilvie
stressed that ‘it is terribly early days’.

Some observers fear that extra money from the trust will simply encourage
the government to cut back its spending on research. However, the MRC said
this week that it did not expect the Wellcome money to have much impact
on the overall relationship between the Medical Research Council and the
charities. Charities have always provided a ‘substantial’ part of total
funds for medical research, said a spokesman. But he added: ‘There is
always some repercussion; if there is a major source of funding (outside
the MRC) then people will always go to them. This could lead to a shifting
of priorities.’