The College of Medical and Dental Sciences has recently completed a major upgrade transforming derelict space into a new, vibrant and modern research facility.
An investment of £9 million by the University has funded the complete renovation of the entire ground floor of the west extension of the Institute of Biomedical Research (IBR), enabling the co-localisation of the bulk of the biomedical research programme of the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences (ICGS) within a single building. Ten additional bio-medical research groups, plus their administrators and managers, have now moved from other sites within the College to join their colleagues in ICGS who already occupy the first and second floors of IBR West. This move greatly facilitates further academic collaboration and sharing of techniques/technologies between groups of colleagues throughout ICGS.
The redesigned and newly equipped laboratories are supported by dedicated facilities for cell culture and recombinant DNA technology, with office space for 80 people. The new groups moving in include world leaders in the fields of cell biology and cancer, making contributions in the areas of gene regulation and epigenetics, stem cell and blood cell development, immunology, stem cell therapy, cancer biology and cancer genomics. The important fundamental research delivered in these areas underpins the next generation of cancer treatments and other therapies which will ultimately save patient lives.
The new labs are aligned with desk space for 65 support staff, to be used by the students, technicians, bioinformaticians and lab-based post-doctoral researchers belonging to the new research groups, and office space for all the research group leaders and administrators.
