New

The University of Manchester has been awarded a £6m grant by The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to open a new biocentre that will 'revolutionise' the way future medicines are produced - making them safer and more effective.

The Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (MCISB) will pioneer a new approach to biology with the aim of helping pharmaceutical companies to develop better drugs faster. 'Systems biology' is a new approach to genomics that uses computational and mathematical analysis to advance, combining experimentation with computer simulations to process experimental results, design new experiments and generate generic and predictive solutions that are widely applicable.

The £6m grant will be used to develop new methods of computational and mathematical analysis, validating these methods by testing them in yeast - 48% of yeast genes are similar to human genes. These methods will then be used to create generic computational models with the potential to allow pharmaceutical companies to perform virtual trials of any medicine on any living organism.

Professor Douglas Kell, director, MCISB, said: 'The last 50 years of molecular biology have failed to discover the existence of a substantial number of genes in some very well studied organisms, which has hindered the development of the most effective medicines. Our aim is to develop systems that will allow University scientists and pharmaceutical companies to understand how every gene in an organism works and reacts. This will provide them with the tools they need to develop safer and more effective medicines and will put Manchester on the map as one of the world centres for systems biology research.

The Manchester Centre for Integrative systems biology is one of three new centres funded by the BBSRC. The others are based at Imperial College London and the University of Newcastle.