US billionaire offers $25m to Melbourne institutes

US billionaire and fairy godfather Charles Feeney has offered Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) $AUD25 million to build new laboratories and clinical research facilities.

MCRI director Prof Bob Williamson said that the hospital and institute had been in discussions for more than a year with Atlantic Philanthropies since first being approached by the charitable organisation, which is responsible for disbursing Feeney's sizable fortune.

Under the terms of the offer, matching funds must be raised by the hospital and MCRI, but Williamson said he was confident that this would be achieved through a combination of state and federal money and charitable organisations.

"We're very fortunate, because the state government has already given us $5 million from the STI initiative," he said, adding that he believed the institutes were already well on the way to raising the rest of the $25 million required.

The donation would be used to support child health research, primarily for new facilities for both laboratory and clinical research.

Williamson said that the institute had been extremely successful in gaining competitive grants, with $22 million in grants awarded last year compared to $7 million in 1999. But the downside to the grants was the severe limitations on laboratory space for the 200 or so new staff and students.

"We have no new space; there is a desperate need for new labs," he explained. "It is wonderful to succeed in winning grants but if you reach the point of having no space it is very demoralising for the staff."

Work on the first phase of the new facility, a five-story building dedicated to research, was expected to begin within weeks, and would probably be completed by the end of the year. A second building would be added later, to provide a total of 6000 square metres of space.

Cancer research, imaging, genetics and functional genomics research units would be housed in the new facility, as would researchers studying cord blood and stem cells, said Williamson.

Atlantic Philanthropies' senior vice-president and head of the group's US and Asia-Pacific programs, Alan Ruby, said that the combination of world-class research coupled with a commitment to public and preventative health meant that the hospital and institute were world-class centres of excellence, on par with Children's Hospital Boston and the Institute of Child Health in London. He also noted the institutions' commitments to outreach and training in the South-East Asian region.

"These institutions and staffs are committed to a vision of a world where no infant, child or adolescent suffers illness, and where research made accessible guarantees the best health for all young people," he said in an email to Australian Biotechnology News.

The donation is not the first by Atlantic Philanthropies to Australian medical research. It has made donations to Victorian operations RMIT, the Baker Institute and Bio21, as well as more than $70 million to Queensland institutes including the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation and the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

Around $US103 million was awarded by Feeney's charity to Australian organisations between 1982 and 2001, part of $US2.5 billion awarded globally for a variety of purposes including health and aging, education and human rights.