Researchers at Southampton’s university hospitals have been awarded £9.2m to continue leading and participating in groundbreaking clinical trials.
The five-year funding arrangement, announced by the Department of Health and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), will help to support studies into a range of novel medical treatments.
In addition to covering the costs of specialist research nurses and technical staff at the NIHR Wellcome Trust Southampton Clinical Research Facility, it will also be used to ensure access to the latest cutting-edge facilities and equipment.
Funding for the facility, which is a partnership between University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust and the University and based at Southampton General Hospital, is part of a £112m national investment.
It follows a separate announcement, made in September, of £15m awarded by the Department of Health and NIHR to help tackle obesity, asthma, allergies and infections through the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre in Southampton.
Recent breakthroughs made at the NIHR Wellcome Trust Southampton Clinical Research Facility include identifying an effective treatment for peanut allergies in children and developing the first new therapeutic asthma treatment for a decade.
Professor Saul Faust, Professor of Paediatric Immunology and Infectious Diseases, director of the NIHR Wellcome Trust Southampton Clinical Research Facility, said:
We are delighted to have secured this funding for the next five years as it gives us a fantastic opportunity to continue to lead developments in many areas of medicine as well as collaborate with our colleagues on major international breakthroughs.
We are extremely lucky in Southampton to have access to excellent research facilities through the hospital trust’s partnership with the University of Southampton which has enabled our researchers to participate in and oversee some very significant developments in recent years.
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