Wellcome Trust sets out ten year plan to tackle major medical challenges

For the next ten years the Wellcome Trust will concentrate on supporting major global health challenges including combating infectious diseases and examining the impacts of climate change and population migration.

The health charity’s new Strategic Plan was launched on 22 February and aims to support the very best researchers to address five challenges aimed at transforming human and animal health over the next decade. These are:

• Maximising the health benefits of genetics and genomics
• Understanding the brain
• Combating infectious disease 
• Investigating development, ageing and chronic disease
• Connecting the environment, nutrition and health

Capacity strengthening remains a priority and researchers from low and middle-income countries will have access to funding through the newly established Investigator Awards as well as fellowship schemes and major programmes such as the African Institutions Initiative.

Launching the strategy, Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust said: "We face many serious challenges, including ageing populations, the threat of global climate change and the emergence of new diseases. The Wellcome Trust is extraordinarily well positioned to give researchers the freedom and security to pursue the questions that will provide answers to these challenges. But scientific discoveries - and their application to patient benefit - take time, and that is why we are setting out our plans for the next decade."

• Download the Strategic Plan (PDF 967 KB)
• Visit www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Strategy/index.htm

Image: Pancreatic cancer cells. Credit: Anne Weston/Wellcome Images