Wellcome Trust ISSF
The University has been awarded a block grant from the Wellcome Trust’s Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) for Translational Biomedical Research. The ISSF aims to translate the excellent biomedical discovery science underpinning our world recognised research strengths to:
- Understand the links between biological mechanisms and human diseases;
- Identify and develop biomarkers for patient stratification;
- Identify novel lead compounds for discovery science and clinical development;
- Influence future clinical practices
Purpose of the Pilot Fund
A portion of the ISSF award is being used to run the Translational Pilot Fund, an internal scheme to fund pilot projects, which aims to support translational development of biomedical discovery science in the University and Medical School, to build and sustain the future drug discovery portfolio. Projects should be directed at infectious diseases or new therapies for cancer and other major non-infectious diseases. This pilot fund will support exploratory studies to enable new drug targets arising from discovery science projects to access key resources that are required to bridge from discovery to translational science. We aim to enable both strong clinical target validation and entry into the drug discovery pipeline.
For this final round, up to £300k is available. We envisage this may be used to pilot new projects, establish new methodologies, develop cross disciplinary facilities, and establish links between discovery scientists and translational drug discovery and/or clinical colleagues. It is not expected that individual projects will exceed £30k unless the request is for multi-user equipment.
The Pilot Fund is intended to be flexible and creative and to support a range of needs. For example we will:
- Fund extensions and bridges for PhD students and Postdocs at the end of their current project, who show a desire and ability to progress to a translational phase, and by doing so enhance their skills and career progression. Extension funding will usually not exceed 6 months.
- Fund training for PhD students and research staff in key translational research skills, either within the Sussex Translational Platform or externally.
- Support a PI wishing to take one aspect of their research into a translational phase, by funding resource additional to their current discovery science funding to, for example, transfer a cellular assay developed in the discovery laboratory into a high-throughput format.
- Fund the purchase of reagents, facility access or studies at external Commercial Research Organisations, that would enable a PI to take a translational step in a project funded on a discovery science basis.
- Fund the purchase of shared multi-user equipment that will enable researchers to progress projects towards drug discovery.
Deadline: 12 noon Monday 29th June 2020
More information can be found in the specificiation and application form:
Contact
If you would like to discuss your application please contact the ISSF lead, Laurence Pearl, Laurence.Pearl@sussex.ac.uk
All public engagement queries should be directed to Katy Petherick, K.Petherick@sussex.ac.uk
All costing queries should be directed to Debbie Foy, D.Foy@sussex.ac.uk