London

Fresh fields: the new centre 'will offer synergies in treatment, diagnosis and medicine'.

Scientists at the Daresbury Laboratory in northwest England are celebrating the UK government's decision to build a major new accelerator and imaging centre at the lab.

The £150 million (US$220 million) investment should secure the laboratory's future. This had been in doubt since the government announced plans to build a synchrotron farther south at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire (see Nature 404, 323; 2000) that will cost £550 million to build and run.

Announcing the funding during a visit to Daresbury last week, the trade and industry secretary Stephen Byers said the project would “greatly enhance the northwest's science base, bring developments in the treatment of cancer and improve treatments for other diseases”.

“Daresbury has an international reputation for its scientific work,” Byers continued, “and is rightly a source of pride both for the region and for the country as a whole.”

The new Centre for Accelerator Science, Imaging and Medicine (CASIM) will feature a proton cyclotron — which is used in various research disciplines and in cancer treatment — together with an ion-beam facility for nuclear physics, two free-electron lasers and X-ray imaging equipment. Construction work on the projects, which are still subject to scientific review and feasibility studies, could begin as early as this autumn.

The centre will work in partnership with universities, hospitals and private companies in the region. “It offers clear synergies in treatment, diagnosis and medicine,” explains Peter Weightman, a surface scientist at Liverpool University who led the project proposal. Weightman says it will allow cancer treatments based on X-ray therapy and proton therapy, for example, to be compared for the first time.

Weightman believes that this linking of the science base and the country's health service was key to the proposal's success. The government can dip into both the health-service and core-science funding pots for the money, he says, as well as using cash allocated to the regional development agency. But he insists it should not be seen as regional aid, as the new centre will be of both national and international scientific significance.

Meanwhile, Daresbury researchers are “delighted with the news”, says spokesman Tony Buckley. “The staff cheered the secretary of state off the site,” he says, adding that workers at the laboratory are determined to make the project a “real scientific success”. Some had feared that Daresbury would close when its existing synchrotron radiation source closes in 2007, and many researchers have already left to take up jobs elsewhere.

Byers also announced that a £24 million biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility will be built in the region. It is designed to plug a gap between research and its commercial exploitation by making large numbers of candidate molecules available for early-stage trials.

And, still smarting from last year's synchrotron defeat at the hands of its Oxfordshire rival, the northwest is to get its own 'science council', adding the weight of universities and industry to the lobbying power of its existing regional development agency.

“Not often are scientists lost for words in reaction to a government announcement of funding,” Weightman says. “But this morning I think we all were.”