Plans to set up a new life sciences research centre at Dundee University have had a £4.9 million boost.
The grant represents more than a third of the total cost of the planned building, which will bring together scientists from various disciplines to study potential new medicines.
The money has come from two of the UK’s biggest science funding bodies, the Wellcome Trust and the Wolfson Foundation, both of which have a long history of backing pioneering work at Dundee.
Wellcome Trust director Sir Mark Walport said, “World-class science needs to be supported by world-class infrastructure, which requires significant investment.
“The partnership between the trust and the foundation will provide an important injection of cash into our universities at a time when they face uncertainty about future capital funding.”
Dundee’s grant is part of a £30 million package aimed at supporting leading scientists across the country.
The university will use it to set up a centre for translational and interdisciplinary research.
Professor Mike Ferguson, who is leading the project, said, “Our centre will do two things.
“It will double our capacity in drug discovery, allowing us to translate more basic biomedical research towards real patient benefit.
“And it will bring mathematicians, physicists and computational biologists and chemists into immediate contact with each other, and with our experimentalists, to bring interdisciplinary solutions to biological and medical problems.”
The centre is expected to cost around £12.5million in total and the university is developing proposals to complete the funding.
The new building will sit alongside the existing life sciences complex off Hawkhill, which includes the Wellcome Trust Biocentre and the Sir James Black Centre, where hundreds of scientists work on understanding diseases such as diabetes and cancer.
Wolfson Foundation chief executive Paul Ramsbottom said he was delighted to be able to fund such an exceptional project.
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy Flickr user CIAT – International Center for Tropical Agricultu.