£470,000 in research awards to aid medical advance into chronic diseases

29-Nov-2005

Four medical research projects making impressive advances into the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of life-threatening diseases have been awarded in total over £470,000 by GlaxoSmithKline in their annual medical research awards programme.

They are Meningitis UK (research to develop a Meningitis B vaccine), the British Liver Trust (research involving control of a protein to fight liver disease) , Alzheimer's Research Trust (a study of patients suffering Fronto-temporal dementia) and the Samantha Dickson Research Trust (research into childhood and adult brain tumors).

Katie Pinnock, GlaxoSmithKline's Director of UK Corporate Contributions, said: "GlaxoSmithKline has awarded grants of more than £6 million through this annual medical research award programme in the past ten years. These awards were created to support under-funded areas of medical research such as those presented by this year's award winners. We hope that the 2005 awards will make a significant difference to the on-going work of these vital projects and facilitate new medical advances into these life threatening diseases."

Meningitis UK funds pioneering research projects across the UK, searching for a vaccine to eradicate meningitis and its associated diseases. Although great steps have been made in the fight against the disease with the introduction of the Meningitis C Vaccine, there is still no vaccine available to protect against the most common form of bacterial meningitis in the UK- Meningitis B.

The British Liver Trust, founded in 1988 by a group of leading hepatologists and patients, is the only national liver disease charity for adults and aims to improve the lives of people suffering from liver disease through education, support and funding research. The Trust's award will support a new research project for the prevention and treatment of liver disease involving the control of the protein Nuclear Factor Kappa B (NF-KB). The project is a two-year collaboration between the liver biologist Professor Derek Mann and the chemist Professor Tom Brown, both world renowned experts in their fields, based at the Universityof Southampton, an established centre for the research and treatment of liver disease. Over a two year period, the project will be modifying and testing a new technology that will target and control the protein NF-KB. While this protein normally helps fight infections, in the injured liver it promotes inflammation, fibrosis and cancer. Therapeutic control of NF-KB will benefit the majority of liver diseases.

The Alzheimer's Research Trust was founded in 1992 to promote and raise funds for research into causes and cures of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The award will go towards a major programme into Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) which is frequently misdiagnosed and is as common as Alzheimer's disease in people aged 45 to 64.

The Samantha Dickson Research Trust set up some nine years ago to raise funds for research into adult and child brain tumors will use the award for a project being led by Professor V.P.Collins in Cambridgelooking into two common solid tumors of the central nervous system (CNS) in children, pilocytic astrocytoma and ependymomas. This study will focus on two of the three commonest solid CNS tumors in children (as opposed to leukaemias, cancers of the blood). Studies of the DNA in many different adult tumors have led to new ways of identifying tumors earlier, and with greater certainty, and more recently to the development of new specific treatments that do not harm normal cells. Present treatments for brain tumors generally damage the developing normal brain cells in the child.

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/news/50540/470-000-in-research-awards-to-aid-medical-advance-into-chronic-diseases.html