The Novo Nordisk Foundation recently awarded grants of DKK 75 million for purchasing advanced research equipment to strengthen the research infrastructure in biomedicine, clinical research, biotechnology and the natural and technical sciences at Denmark’s universities and hospitals.
The Foundation awarded three of the grants to researchers at the Technical University of Denmark. Researchers at Odense University Hospital, Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen each received one grant.
All the grants will enable researchers to establish advanced research infrastructure that will support new knowledge in their field. In addition, once the new research infrastructure from all six grants is established, it will be made widely available for use in the research community, including industry.
One of the six grants will fund the development of a technology platform at the Technical University of Denmark that can be used to investigate the potential use of microorganisms as alternatives to antibiotics for disease control. The platform will be used to study communities of microorganisms – microbiomes – in greater detail through in situ microscopy and chemical analysis. Improving knowledge of microorganisms is a prerequisite for developing and applying their potential to promote health and control disease among people and in animals and plants.
The project is an example of research infrastructure that is at the interface between biomedicine, biotechnology and the natural sciences. From 2020, the Foundation will expand its grants for research infrastructure to focus even more on interdisciplinary interfaces, and the research fields supported will be expanded to include more fields related to biotechnology and the natural and technical sciences.
Doubling the grants for research infrastructure
To enable this expansion of research fields, the Foundation will expand the total amount of grants for research infrastructure. Specifically, the amount awarded in 2020 will double to DKK 150 million.
“Scientific progress relies heavily on the opportunity to perform experiments using high-quality research infrastructure. There is currently an unmet need to support the costly process of acquiring and operating new, advanced research equipment at Denmark’s research institutions. The Novo Nordisk Foundation would like to contribute to accommodating this unmet need, which is why we are expanding our support for research infrastructure, both financially and scientifically,” says Lene Oddershede, Head of Nat-Tech, Novo Nordisk Foundation.
The application round for research infrastructure grants in 2020 opens on 11 December, and applications can be submitted for research in the following fields: biomedicine, the health sciences, biotechnology and sustainable development, the natural and technical sciences with potential applications in biomedicine or biotechnology, and interdisciplinary research across these areas.
Novo Nordisk Foundation grants for research infrastructure in 2019
- A Unique Infrastructure for Real-time Metabolic Studies of Biological Samples from Cells to Organs – HyperNMR: DKK 14,049,000
Technical University of Denmark - DTU-SCore: Open-access High-throughput Screening Core for Biomedicine: DKK 10,600,000
Technical University of Denmark - Imaging Microbial Language in Biocontrol (IMLiB): DKK 13,731,657
Technical University of Denmark - OUH-CELL-BENCH: a GMP Facility for Cell Therapeutics: DKK 10,477,018
Odense University Hospital - AXIA: Aarhus X-ray Imaging Alliance: DKK 16,379,168
Aarhus University - CPHSAXS – Center for Biological SAXS at the University of Copenhagen: DKK9,763,157
University of Copenhagen
A complete list including names of the grant recipients is available here.
Further information
Christian Mostrup Scheel, Senior Press Officer, phone: +45 3067 4805, [email protected]
