From cells to societies, Wellcome is directing £73mn to boost transformative research environments which empower researchers to overcome specific barriers to progress in their fields.
Discovery research has near limitless potential to transform our understanding of life, health and wellbeing and improve lives. But researchers can be faced with barriers too substantial to overcome alone, which prevents the pursuit of discoveries in their field.
To address this, we are directing £73 million into eight new Discovery Research Platforms which will bring together researchers, teams and collaborators to address a range of practical, technological and methodological barriers holding up progress in many fields.
To break down these research barriers, researchers need creative environments which include a diverse range of people and perspectives. Working in partnership with Wellcome, the Discovery Research Platforms will seek to deliver a positive and inclusive research culture that provides the conditions for researchers to conduct their best work.
This platform aims to address conceptual and technical barriers to improve understanding of how changes in the molecular networks surrounding cells lead to tissue decline. This has the potential to positively impact chronic diseases including cancer and fibrosis.
This platform will empower humanities and social science researchers, experts by experience, and health, creative and voluntary sector professionals to co-develop new and experimental approaches to tackling health challenges, including mental health and health inequalities.
This platform aims to take on gaps in our knowledge that hold back understanding of the interaction between infection and non-communicable diseases, and strengthen capacity to enable locally led, high-quality research.
This platform plans to develop new concepts, methods and tools that address issues of conflicting values in society, including real-time digital mapping of value disagreements and facilitating engagement with excluded voices and problems.
This platform will create a unique facility with transformative imaging technology, novel experimental designs and innovative analytics, all dedicated to studying how the human brain engages with the real world. It aims to provide new perspectives on the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and mental health conditions.
This platform aims to address practical barriers preventing data integration across metabolic and endocrine science. It will investigate how hormones control metabolic processes and how these can go wrong in disorders such as obesity, diabetes and cachexia, and create tools to facilitate global access to this data.
This platform seeks to move stem cell biology to the tissue and organ scale of research, creating a new network of local and international researchers to enable strategies that capitalise on new in vitro models to develop better treatments for human patients.
This platform plans to develop new tools to discover and characterise understudied proteins, visualise protein assemblies within cells and record rare cellular events, potentially opening new avenues for research into uncharacterised diseases and drug resistance.
Discovery Research Platforms will bring together researchers, teams and collaborators to address a range of practical, technological and methodological barriers holding up progress in many fields.