Thursday 2 June 2011
Professor Dale Wigley of The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) has been announced as a recipient of one of the inaugural Wellcome Trust Investigator Awards.
The Investigator Awards are allocating £56 million of funding to exceptional researchers addressing the most important questions about health and disease. Professor Wigley will receive £2.14 million under this programme.
The Awards aim to provide scientists with the flexibility and time to enable them to tackle important research questions. Recipients of the inaugural Awards include some of the brightest minds in biomedical science.
Professor Wigley says: “I am thrilled to receive this award, which will help my team and I to tackle a more ambitious and integrated programme of research. I hope that this research will transform our understanding of how the vital cell processes DNA repair and chromatin remodelling can influence and cause human disease.”
The team use techniques such as x-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, biophysics, biochemistry and molecular biology to understand the structural basis for the function and regulation of proteins and complexes implicated in cancer.
Professor Wigley’s research programme involves the structure and mechanism of enzymes involved in DNA replication and repair. His current focus is in two main areas: the enzymes involved in the repair of double-strand DNA breaks, and chromatin remodelling systems associated with DNA repair.
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Media Contact: ICR Science Communications Manager Jane Bunce on 0207 153 5106 or after hours 077217 47900
The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR)
- The ICR is Europe’s leading cancer research centre
- The ICR has been ranked the UK’s top academic research centre, based on the results of the Higher Education Funding Council’s Research Assessment Exercise
- The ICR works closely with partner The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust to ensure patients immediately benefit from new research. Together the two organisations form the largest comprehensive cancer centre in Europe
- The ICR has charitable status and relies on voluntary income, spending 90 pence in every pound of total income directly on research
- As a college of the University of London, the ICR also provides postgraduate higher education of international distinction
- Over its 100-year history, the ICR’s achievements include identifying the potential link between smoking and lung cancer which was subsequently confirmed, discovering that DNA damage is the basic cause of cancer and isolating more cancer-related genes than any other organisation in the world
For more information visit www.icr.ac.uk