LONDON The UK government has allocated £110 million over three years to a new multi-research council genomics project to develop our understanding of the role of genes, their interactions and the gene products.
"There are clearly huge potential medical benefits," said the UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury. "The benefits are already arriving in diagnosis and drug design, and we are going to see major impacts, for example, from medical treatments genetically tuned to individual patients."
Today the UK research councils have, in fact, picked up £252 million over three years in extra cross-council funds, to be spent in genomics, 'e-science' and basic technology. These special programmes are themselves part of a total three-year increase of £725m, announced as a total in the Treasury's summer spending review but only allocated to specific programmes and councils today.
For example, we now learn that the Medical Research Council (MRC) will receive an increase ...
