wellcome trust

This week, the search for a vaccine for COVID-19: will we succeed, and when? Plus, in the news, the search for a chemical fingerprint for severe COVID-19, bacteria that live inside cancers, and could something in your genes make coronavirus harder to deal with... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Synthetic biology - engineering life - is set to revolutionise the world, but how? We'll be hearing about some of the most exciting applications for synthetic biology, and how it's being commercialised. Plus, our gene of the month has got itself all in a twist.

Synthetic biology - engineering life - is set to revolutionise the world, but how? We'll be hearing about some of the most exciting applications for synthetic biology, and how it's being commercialised. Plus, our gene of the month has got itself all in a twist. Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Africa

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Africa

Short film introducing the Wellcome Trust for Human Genetics In the first decades of the 21st century, researchers are beginning to understand in detail how our genetic inheritance makes us who we are. At the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, our aim is to extend that understanding in order to gain a clearer insight into mechanisms of health and disease. Looking across all three billion letters of the human genetic code, we aim to pinpoint variant spellings and discover how they increase or decrease an individual’s risk of falling ill. The WTCHG is a research institute of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, funded by the University, the Wellcome Trust and numerous other sponsors. It is based in purpose-built laboratories on the University of Oxford’s Biomedical Research Campus in Headington, one of the largest concentrations of biomedical expertise in the world. With more than 400 active researchers and around 70 employed in administrative and support roles, the Centre is an international leader in genetics, genomics and structural biology. We collaborate with research teams across the world on a number of large-scale studies in these areas. Our researchers expend close to £20m annually in competitively-won grants, and publish around 300 primary papers per year.

Over two-thirds of the energy in the fuel you put into your car is wasted, most of it in the form of heat that exits along the exhaust pipe. The same is true of large-scale power stations, which are only 50% efficient at best. But now researchers are bringing 200 year old physics to bear against the problem by developing thermoelectric generators (TEGs) that can turn waste heat into useful electricity and this week we find out how. Plus, news that disguising cancer cells as Salmonella could hold the key to producing effective anti-cancer vaccines, why the Y chromosome boosts heart attack risk,... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

Writer and medical historian Conrad Keating talks to Dr. Brian Angus, Director of the Wellcome Trust UK Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine in Oxford, about his interest in science and how this inspired him to work with infectious diseases in Africa. Dr Brian Angus originally worked with Professor Nick White in Thailand and joined the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine in 1993. In this wide-ranging discussion with the writer and medical historian Conrad Keating, Brian talks about his work with medical students, how he contracted Dengue fever in Thailand, and why scientific research on tropical diseases in developing countries benefits the people of Britain.

On one of Kevin Marsh's regular visits to Oxford, the historian Conrad Keating caught up with the world-renowned malariologist and asked him what initially drew him to tropical medicine... Africa is the world's most malarious continent, and the east coast of Kenya has been particularly debilitated by the disease. In 1987 Kevin Marsh visited the area and recognised that the region offered great possibilities for an integrated programme of research on malaria that linked basic scientific, clinical and epidemiological approaches. In collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and Oxford University, and supported by the Wellcome Trust, a small, dedicated team began work in 1989. From modest beginnings in Kilifi, the Wellcome Research Programme has grown under Kevin Marsh's direction to become the most prestigious research programme in Africa. Its state-of-the-art laboratory houses 800 staff who produce over 100 peer review papers a year, working on major causes of ill health in Kenya and other countries in east Africa.

The historian Conrad Keating continues his history of Oxford's groundbreaking contribution to health in the tropics by asking David Warrell what motivated him to work in Africa... The modern history of Oxford's medical contribution to the great neglected diseases of mankind begins with David Warrell's appointment as Director of the Mahidol-Oxford-Wellcome Unit in Bangkok, Thailand in May, 1979. Tropical research had fascinated Warrell since his time working in Nigeria and Addis Ababa in 1968. Together with his wife Mary, a medical virologist, he was chosen by David Weatherall, the Nuffield Professor of Medicine, to be Oxford's first practitioner of "medicine in the tropics" and he set himself the task of researching the patho-physiology of diseases. Jettisoning a safe, if uninspiring career as a consultant physician at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and supported by a Wellcome grant, he began research on cerebral malaria and the intradermal application of rabies vaccines. Although David Weatherall was unsure as to the Unit's longevity, his initial scepticism was soon dispelled: "David Warrell did an extremely fine job in setting up the unit and I was extremely proud of them all when I saw one of the first papers, the New England Journal of Medicine piece on the positive harm that can be done by treating cerebral malaria with steroids and the advice for its better management; what a wonderful start!" As well as becoming a world authority on snake bites, David Warrell laid the foundations for scientific excellence that Nick White and Nick Day have built upon so successfully in recent years. It was undoubtedly the enormous success of the Bangkok unit that has given rise to the other outstanding units based in Oxford, Vietnam, Laos and Kenya.

Conrad Keating, the medical historian, opens his series with an interview with Sir David Weatherall to mark World Malaria Day on April 25th 2010. Sir David was appointed Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine in 1974, and in 1989 he founded the Institute of Molecular Medicine (in 2000 it was renamed The Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine). Sir David tells the story of the evolution of tropical medicine in Oxford from its inception in the late 1970s to its unrivaled standing in the developing world today.