Four medical research projects making impressive advances into the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of life-threatening diseases have been awarded in total over £470,000 by GlaxoSmithKline in their annual medical research awards programme.

They are Meningitis UK- research to develop a Meningitis B vaccine, The British Liver Trust - research involving control of a protein to fight liver disease, Alzheimer's Research Trust - a study of patients suffering Fronto-temporal dementia and The Samantha Dickson Research Trust - research into childhood and adult brain tumours, informs a GSK release.

Katie Pinnock, GlaxoSmithKline's director of UK corporate contributions, said: "GlaxoSmithKline has awarded grants of more than £6 million through this annual medical research award programme in the past ten years. These awards were created to support under-funded areas of medical research such as those presented by this year's award winners. We hope that the 2005 awards will make a significant difference to the on-going work of these vital projects and facilitate new medical advances into these life threatening diseases."

Meningitis UK will utilise the GSK award to fund a project led by Dr Andrew Pollard from the University of Oxford. He and his team will be studying the development of a new Meningitis B Vaccine candidate made from one of the common proteins found on the surface of the Meningitis B germ, using novel strategy that gets around the variability of Meningitis B germs.

Dr Pollard said, "Meningitis is a major killer of children throughout the world. The funding provided by GSK to Meningitis UK will allow our team to work on development of a new vaccine that will target the Group B strain and could save lives."

The British Liver Trust, founded in 1988 by a group of leading hepatologists and patients, is the only national liver disease charity for adults and aims to improve the lives of people suffering from liver disease through education, support and funding research. The trust's award will support a new research project for the prevention and treatment of liver disease involving the control of the protein Nuclear Factor Kappa B (NF-KB).

Over a two year period, the project will be modifying and testing a new technology that will target and control the protein NF-KB. While this protein normally helps fight infections, in the injured liver it promotes inflammation, fibrosis and cancer. Therapeutic control of NF-KB will benefit the majority of liver diseases.

Liver disease is a collective term for a range of diseases including hepatitis, cirrhosis and cancer. Together they have a major impact on the quality and length of life of a large number of individuals with as many as 6,000 people dying from cirrhosis of the liver in the UK each year. Many liver disease sufferers can not be treated with the two options currently available, surgery or antiviral treatment, and the third option, organ transplant is clearly limited by the number of donors.

Professor Mann said, "This research (siRNA) will enable us to produce a drug that is not only a highly effective inhibitor of NF-KB, but will also lack the side-effects associated with more conventional drugs."

The Alzheimer's Research Trust was founded in 1992 to promote and raise funds for research into causes and cures of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The award will go towards a major programme into Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) which is frequently misdiagnosed and is as common as Alzheimer's disease in people aged 45 to 64.

"Whilst there are currently no specific treatments, there are several new drugs that may offer benefit with others on the horizon. Accurate diagnosis and the ability to predict and track disease progression are critical to the success of future clinical trials. With this GSK grant we are able to invest in long term follow up of patients which is critically important in understanding how these diseases develop and how we might track the effects of potential treatments," states Professor Martin, professor of clinical neurology who together with Professor Nick Fox is running this FTD programme as part of the Dementia Research Group.

The Samantha Dickson Research Trust set up some nine years ago to raise funds for research into adult and child brain tumours will use the award for a project being led by Professor V.P. Collins in Cambridge looking into two common solid tumours of the central nervous system (CNS) in children, pilocytic astrocytoma and ependymomas.

This study will focus on two of the three commonest solid CNS tumours in children, as opposed to leukaemia's, cancers of the blood.