Some of the UK’s most prestigious life science laboratories are having to review their research strategies to adjust to reduced funding as the Wellcome Trust winds down its long-established system of institutional funding.
Under a revamp of the biomedical research charity’s funding, the Wellcome Trust is ending its ongoing support for its research centres with funding directed towards new “discovery research platforms”, of which eight were awarded a total of £73 million in May 2023.
The changes are likely to affect the 15 Wellcome centres, which received about £25 million a year in core funding. Many of the centres are now having to cope without this funding stream after their core grants ran out at the end of 2023, with senior scientists anxiously seeking replacement funds from other sources, Times Higher Education has been told.
One of those affected is the Gurdon Institute, a research laboratory at the University of Cambridge that focuses on cancer and developmental biology. It was founded in 1989 and renamed in 2004 after Sir John Gurdon, the biologist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, whose research group is based there.
