About Wessex Medical Research
Hope relies entirely upon voluntary donations to fund medical research. Its researchers range in experience from established researchers and clinicians with national and international reputations, to scientists young in career.
Medical research covers everything from looking after people to looking at molecules. Nurses, midwives and therapists tend to be at the ‘people’ end but they are just as much in the research area as white-coated scientists - and Hope funds across the spectrum.
Hope’s Silver Jubilee appeal, Hope for Healthy Babies, needs £1 million to fund three vital research programmes:
- to find a vaccine for meningitis B
- establish how a mother’s nutrition and health affects the health of her baby
- childhood diseases
Meningitis - a killer disease
Meningitis is a disease which affects more than 3,000 people a year in the UK, killing over 150. It mainly affects very young babies but teenagers are also at risk.
There is a successful vaccine for the C strain of the disease but no such protection from the more complex B strain. Professor John Heckels at the University of Southampton is at the forefront of the international search for a vaccine against meningitis B. The very latest developments in molecular biology are employed to analyse the different proteins involved, using the new technique of proteomics.
Healthy babies make healthy adults
Following pioneering work by Professor David Barker, funded by Hope, on the significance of a mother’s health and nutrition on the future health of her unborn child, the once sceptical world scientific community now fully accepts the findings and his research leads the world.
Our susceptibility to getting heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis in adulthood can depend on what our mothers ate and the next stage of the research, which has the potential to make huge cuts in deaths from these diseases, is to find out more about the mechanisms that make healthy babies.
Hope scientists from many disciplines are involved in this vital work.
Children’s diseases
Hope supports research into many aspects of child health. Current studies include research into childhood cancer, infant asthma and allergies, congenital heart disease, cerebral palsy, bone growth, spina bifida and intestinal conditions.
Our history
The Wessex Medical Trust was founded 25 years ago (on 7th November 1977) by Sir Donald Acheson and others to “..further medical education, medical research and medical practice…”
Now called Hope, the aim of the charity is to support leading medical research throughout Wessex (Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands), but the benefits of improved treatments and diagnosis spread far beyond these boundaries.
In its 25 years, Hope has pumped £15 million into over 700 different projects, ranging from studies into cancers, stroke and heart disease, liver diseases and Alzheimer’s disease to child health issues such as asthma, maternal influences on foetal growth and children with cerebral palsy.
Whilst Hope has made some large grants, for example in human genetics and gut diseases, it has a long track record of providing the start up funding for young scientists and innovative science. These researchers have attracted bigger research grants of up to 30 times Hope’s original investment, proving the value of its pump-priming approach.