£6m Expansion For Cancer Research Centre
The renowned cancer research base at Dundee University is to undergo a £6m expansion which will create around 100 jobs and generate up to £10m of additional research income in the first five years.
The investment includes new laboratories for husband and wife professors Sir David and Birgit Lane who are returning from their extended sabbatical in Singapore in January to lead the new Division of Molecular Medicine. The £6m investment in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee will create two new divisions of Molecular Medicine and Molecular and Environmental Microbiology and see the development of a cell behaviour and tissue biology group.
The work has been made possible by a £2m grant from the Wolfson Foundation and £1m funding from Scottish Enterprise Tayside with the rest coming from the university.
“This is yet another exciting development for Dundee, and it is great to be coming back here as the medical research base at the university continues to move from strength to strength,” said Sir David. “This is the ideal place to be if you are doing this kind of research, and we look forward to continuing our work at the university.”
Professor Pete Downes, vice-principal of the university and head of the College of Life Science, said the development would give Dundee one of the most intensive research environments in the UK.
“We are vigorously pursuing a recruitment programme to add to the range of world-class researchers and staff we have here in Dundee. When completed, our complex will be home to one of the largest single-site research bases in the UK.”
The new facilities will be based in the Medical Sciences Institute building at the university, which has undergone major refurbishment to provide a state-of-the-art research environment for this new phase in the development of the College of Life Sciences.
They will underpin the college’s strategy for coupling basic research to the introduction of innovative models of knowledge transfer in the areas of drug discovery, biomarker development, diagnostic tools and smart, tissue-based drug screening technologies.
This builds on a successful track record in knowledge transfer and the application of key discoveries from fundamental research.
