The Pirbright Institute, one of the U.K.'s leading animal health research centers, said it received £18.5 million ($29 million) in new funding for the training of future veterinary scientists.
The money is part of £125 million ($200 million) of investments announced by U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable and comes from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council as part of the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, the institute said in a press release.
The funding is part of a national 5-year investment from the research council to foster a new generation of scientists trained to face the challenges of the growing global demand for food. The program is designed to help support up to 180 doctoral students over the next 5 years.
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| Gail Preston |
"Students will be able to draw on expertise across the partnership to tackle important challenges such as the control of viral diseases of farm animals and of viruses that spread from animals to humans," Gail Preston, the director of the program at Oxford, said in a statement.
Adrian Hill, a researcher and director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford, which is a close partner of the Pirbright Institute, has recently been in the news for his team's work on an Ebola vaccine that is being developed by drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
- see the release