Follow the money: Scotland funds a brain gain

The Scottish Institute for Cell Signalling, established in October 2008 with a £10 million grant from the Scottish Government and based at the University of Dundee, has made its first scientific appointments, with leading researchers recruited from Europe and North America.

The first three team leaders at the Institute, which is led by Philip Cohen, are Thimo Kurz, who is relocating to Dundee from ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Dr Arno Alpi, from the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK; and Gabriela

Alexandru, who will come from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena.

Cohen said, “My top three candidates have all accepted offers to join this exciting new venture, despite receiving several other attractive counter-offers from other leading research institutes around the world.”

The £10 million grant is being used to set up a Protein Ubiquitylation Unit, with the aim of creating a critical mass of leading researchers in the field, an area which Scotland is betting on to become a future focus of drug discovery for the pharmaceutical industry. The aim is to attract inward investment by the pharma and biotech industry to capitalise on the ubiquitin research.

Ubiquitin, which regulates multiple cellular control mechanisms has been singled out by Scotland’s technology prospecting body, ITI Life Sciences, as a rich source of future drug targets. It set up the Scottish Institute for Cell Signalling in October 2008.