New Oak Foundation award helps future-proof scientific research facilities
Oak Foundation has awarded £750,000 to support the John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory’s Healthy Plants, Healthy People, Healthy Planet (HP3) vision.
This generous donation will help a vital element of the HP3 project by facilitating the Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) programme to create Technology Platform 1 (TP1). TP1 will establish a 3,900m² next-generation glasshouse, insectary and horticultural facility with the scale, precision, and data integration required for world-leading plant and microbial science.
Image caption: Dr Simon Foster (TSL), Professor Cristóbal Uauy (JIC), Dr Victor Soria-Carrasco (JIC), John Lord (JIC), and Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith (BBSRC) breaking ground on TP1 as part of the NGI programme.
Professor Cristóbal Uauy, Director of the John Innes Centre, said: “The climate emergency is reshaping global agriculture, with heat stress, drought, flooding and emerging diseases reducing yields and destabilising food production systems worldwide.
“These challenges demand a change in our collective scientific capability. We need to be able to simulate precise climate scenarios, integrate molecular and environmental data at scale, and study plant-microbe-insect interactions under controlled conditions.
“TP1 will enhance our capability, reproducibility and ambition of our research in crop resilience, plant immunity, sustainable agriculture and plant-derived solutions for human and environmental health. We are grateful to Oak Foundation for supporting this vital programme.”
Professor Nick Talbot, Executive Director of The Sainsbury Laboratory, said: “Oak Foundation’s generous support is immensely valuable in realising our ambitious vision: Healthy Plants, Healthy People, Healthy Planet. Together, we are advancing world-class science to tackle urgent global challenges across agriculture, human health, and the environment.”
Healthy plants, healthy people, healthy planet (hp3)
"Together, we are advancing world-class science to tackle urgent global challenges across agriculture, human health, and the environment." - Prof. Nick Talbot FRS
The investment builds on Oak Foundation’s mission to contribute to a safer, fairer, and more sustainable world.
Angela Bowen, John Innes Centre Director of Development, said: “Our generous donors, like Oak Foundation, are helping us to accelerate scientific discovery and translation to deliver tangible benefits for society. We are grateful for their support and confidence in our plans, as we have so far raised £9m towards our £30m target to complete delivery of JIC and TSL’s ambitious vision, following significant anchor funding from the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund.”
