Wellcome Trust’s 10-year plan

Supporting research to overcome challenge of disease

The Wellcome Trust has developed a 10-year strategic plan for 2010-2020 to support research with the aim of improving both human and animal health. The plan focuses on five challenges, including investigating chronic disease at individual and population level. The fourth challenge, ‘Investigating development, ageing and chronic disease’ recognises chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, psychiatric diseases and immune diseases as an immense global health burden. Changes to traditional lifestyles such as migration to urban areas particularly in low and middle- income countries have lead to a growing concern about the development of chronic disease. A particular issue that the Wellcome Trust is interested in is the delivery of care in these settings. Therefore the Wellcome Trust will also support research to inform the effective delivery of interventions through health services and work to gain a better understanding of the interaction between factors that cause chronic disease at the genetic, environmental, lifestyle and socioeconomic level. The challenge this poses is how to apply this knowledge to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases. The inclusion of prevention is important because of the significance of lifestyle on reducing the chance of developing chronic disease, although it is a shame that ‘chronic disease’ has been bracketed with ‘aging’ – too often, chronic disease is seen as a problem only for the elderly, which is often not the case. The fifth challenge is also interesting: ‘Connecting environment, nutrition and health: Developing new initiatives to examine critical issues such as malnutrition and obesity, and the health impacts of climate change and population migration’. This cross-cutting approach will help to identify synergies between the different agendas.

Source: Wellcome Trust, 22 February 2010: click here >>

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