Biology and medicine

Biological research has the potential to provide solutions to some of mankind’s most daunting health care and environmental sustainability problems...

Our bioscience vision is:

• to add value to the UK research and development endeavour
• to play a leadership role in underpinning biology in next generation facilities (e.g. ESS, 4GLS-4th GENERATION LIGHT SOURCE (link opens in a new window) and XFEL Project (link opens in a new window))
• to provide strong bioscience drivers for the Science and Innovation Campuses at Harwell and Daresbury.
  

The challenge is to drive research from the study of individual molecular components in vitro, towards a combination of systems biology and in vivo studies.  This will give us an understanding of biology at both the molecular and the engineering level, and aid drug discovery.

The Council has interdisciplinary, collaborative programmes for protein structure research using its large-scale facilities (SRS (link opens in a new window) which is now closed, Diamond (link opens in a new window), European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (link opens in a new window), Institut Laue-Langevin (link opens in a new window) and ISIS (link opens in a new window)). Spectroscopic and imaging using laser/microscope are also applied to biological and medical research within the Lasers for Science Facility (link opens in a new window) in the Central Laser Facility (link opens in a new window).

The Council also provides innovative spectroscopic and computational techniques which attract substantial external investment and strong interest from the UK scientific community.

Fostered by RCUK, these high-tech collaborative programmes reflect a new and growing move towards understanding the function of proteins in living organisms. The Council is nurturing these leading-edge developments and aims to make them accessible to the UK scientific community as soon as possible.