Medical research in Britain stands to benefit from plans to build two
new 鈥榗entres of excellence鈥�. The governors of the influential Wellcome Trust
met this week to decide whether to approve the plans. The trust, which is
second only to the government in the amount it spends on biomedical research,
believes that institutions devoted to single fields are the best way to
keep leading researchers in Britain and attract scientists from abroad.
One of the proposed centres is a 拢27 million institute in Oxford
to study common diseases that are caused by many factors. The other, which
is at a much more tentative stage, will focus on how conditions such as
Alzheimer鈥檚 disease, schizophrenia and head injuries affect the brain.
Last year, the trust raised 拢2.1 billion from a share issue,
allowing it to invest 拢220 million a year in research. Senior staff
at the trust said last year that much of the money would go towards setting
up centres of excellence (鈥楢 Wellcome injection of cash鈥�, New 女生小视频,
1 August 1992). Bridget Ogilvie, the trust鈥檚 director, said that centres
of excellence acted 鈥榣ike a honeypot鈥�, attracting people from abroad and
keeping them here.
Advertisement
The trust has already established a cancer research institute in Cambridge,
run jointly with the Cancer Research Campaign, and last year it set up the
Sanger Centre, also in Cambridge, to focus on sequencing the genome of the
nematode worm. Dai Rees, secretary of the Medical Research Council, says
that centres of excellence are 鈥榚ssential to get people back to Britain,
and to provide an environment that鈥檚 competitive. Then, they can do their
work better here than anywhere else, and they don鈥檛 have to go abroad to
do work to an international standard.鈥� The first new centre would examine
how different factors 鈥� such as genes, environment and diet 鈥� interact to
cause serious common diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Its main
programme would aim to identify genes which predispose people to diabetes
and high blood pressure.
Michael Morgan, the trust鈥檚 programme director, declined to comment
on the proposed institute before the governors鈥� meeting, but sources say
buildings for the centre will cost 拢14 million, core research activities
拢9 million, and 拢1.2 million will be earmarked for a group
of researchers in Oxford headed by John Todd. His group will investigate
genetic factors underlying insulin-dependent diabetes (see This Week, 31
August 1991).
One part of the plan is to spend 拢3 million relocating a French
research group, headed by Mark Laythrop of the centre for the study of human
polymorphism in Paris, to Oxford. The group has had a long-standing collaboration
with Todd鈥檚 group. Laythrop鈥檚 group will study the genetic basis of susceptibility
to common diseases.
