- The University of Sheffield has received a £1 million grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation towards an expansion of the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN)
- The new grant follows multiple other donations and fundraising initiatives which together have raised over £10 million to date to support the new building and specialist equipment.
- Expansion of the cutting-edge SITraN facility will provide additional research space and equipment, empowering Sheffield researchers to accelerate their world-leading study of neurological conditions including motor neurone disease (MND), dementia, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis (MS)
A long-planned expansion to the University's globally renowned Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) will now go ahead, after a £1 million grant from the Garfield Weston Foundation helped the ambitious capital project secure enough funding to begin building work on site.
The Garfield Weston Foundation is a family-founded grantmaker established in 1958, and supports a wide range of charities across the country. It was set up in the years following Canadian businessman Willard Garfield Weston's move to the UK with his family in the 1930s, creating the Foundation with an endowment of shares in his company, Associated British Foods Wittington Investments. In pursuit of this ambitious philanthropic vision, Garfield gave away 80% of the Weston family’s wealth for the benefit of UK charity projects.
The Foundation's kind support for neuroscience research at Sheffield adds to a previous grant of £1.5 million from the Wolfson Foundation, and a hugely generous £3 million donation from University alumnus Mark Crosbie and his wife Sarah.
Cutting-edge facilities for a world-leading institute
Other key fundraising efforts organised by staff, volunteers and friends of the University have included The Big Walk 2024, which brought in more than £124,000 towards the cost of expanding the world-leading SITraN institute. The Big Walk 2025, taking place in the Peak District this June, will raise further funds for the additional equipment and groundbreaking research planned for the new space.
Cutting-edge facilities to be housed within the expanded SITraN building will include an enhanced setup for live imaging microscopy, enabling much longer cell imaging times to significantly improve existing drug studies. A suite of deep learning computer workstations will also be installed, to allow for the running of pilot data analyses with reserved space on the University of Sheffield supercomputer.
The University is enormously grateful to the Garfield Weston Foundation for its support meaning that preparation works for the expansion of SITraN can now begin on site. Fundraising will continue over the next year to equip state-of-the-art new facilities in the building that will drive forward research to find treatments for devastating neurological conditions including Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Motor Neuron Disease (MND).
Accelerating breakthrough treatments for devastating neurological conditions
Established in 2010, SITraN is unique in its capacity to bring together multidisciplinary teams of scientists, clinicians and patients in a single building, all working to achieve the same goal of developing breakthrough treatments for devastating neurological conditions. This highly collaborative working model has helped accelerate the transition of lab discoveries into early phase clinical trials and new treatments, transforming patient care on a global scale.
Over the last 10 years, world-class researchers at SITraN have made significant progress in understanding the complex biology of these diseases, offering patients access to over 250 clinical trials - more than any other UK centre in this field. SITraN researchers developed Tofersen, the world’s first elective disease-altering treatment for MND, and are currently leading a phase 3 clinical trial to make a breakthrough stem cell therapy for aggressive MS available to hundreds of patients across the NHS.
The institute's newly expanded facility will accelerate the discovery of groundbreaking neurological treatments, offering hope to countless patients and families living with a range of life-changing illnesses.