London-based Wellcome has announced grants totaling £73 million ($92 million) to break down research barriers and support transformative research environments. 

According to Wellcome, although discovery research has the potential to lead to new knowledge and insights into life, health, and well-being, researchers often face barriers that prevent discoveries within their field.

With this commitment, Wellcome will support eight new Discovery Research Platforms that will bring together researchers, teams, and collaborators to address a range of practical, technological, and methodological obstacles. Supported projects include the platform for cell-matrix biology at the University of Manchester, which aims to address conceptual and technical barriers to the understanding of how changes in the molecular networks surrounding cells lead to tissue decline; the platform for infection at the University of Cape Town, which will work to address knowledge gaps regarding the interaction between infection and non-communicable diseases; the platform for integrating metabolic and endocrine science at the University of Cambridge, which aims to address practical barriers preventing data integration across metabolic and endocrine science; and the platform for hidden cell biology at the University of Edinburgh, which will work to discover and characterize understudied proteins, visualize protein assemblies within cells, and record rare cellular events, potentially opening new avenues for research into uncharacterized diseases and drug resistance.

“Discovery Research Platforms are a brand-new approach for Wellcome,” said Wellcome discovery research director Michael Dunn. “By providing substantial support focused on specific research challenges, these environments have the potential to revolutionize fields and provide maximum possible benefit for researchers around the world.”

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