NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council announced two initiatives worth over £35 million ($66 million) to encourage systems biology research.
BBSRC and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council committed £30 million to the Systems Approaches to Biological Research Initiative. The initiative will fund projects in 2007 to increase systems biology research being conducted in universities and institutes.
BBSRC and EPSRC invested £43.6 million in six university-based systems biology centers in 2005. Researchers from those centers are invited to participate in the second initiative, worth £5 million. The Exploiting Systems Biology LINK Initiative will allow them to work with industrial collaborators who will contribute at least 50 per cent of full cost of each project.
The centers are at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, and Imperial College London.