The new £36m building for the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, focusing on drug discovery and development, is on target to be up and running in 2011.

Dr Harry Burns, Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, marked the construction milestone and topped-out the new building.

The occasion also symbolises a key landmark in the fundraising campaign that is now more than halfway to reaching its target of £8m.

Thanks to the generous philanthropic support of Charitable Trusts and Foundations including the Wolfson Foundation, Robertson Trust, Garfield Weston, The Hugh Fraser Foundation and Strathclyde Alumni, £4.9m has been raised so far.

The University of Strathclyde is injecting £28m into the £36m capital build – its largest investment in life sciences to date.

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Dr Burns said: "By expanding the Institute's facilities at the university, this new building will make a significant contribution to Strathclyde's and Scotland's efforts to combat disease and promote public health."

The Institute, currently accommodated across the university campus, was founded in 2006 to enable closer co-operation between science departments and to accelerate the process of drug discovery.

Professor Graham Coombs, Head of the Institute, said: "These new facilities will enable us to increase our activities in drug discovery.

"They will also open up further opportunities for our industrial partners to work alongside our scientists."

The new building will accommodate leading researchers from the chemical, biological and pharmaceutical sciences working together to find new cures and treatments for some of the world's biggest health threats and killers including cancer, heart and infectious diseases affecting the developing world such as leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis, malaria and tuberculosis.

The building will be home to one of the UK's top Pharmacy Schools and include state of the art facilities for 150 researchers, teaching laboratories for undergraduate and Masters students, a 'clean suite' for the handling and packaging of drugs and facilities for commercialisation and industrial interaction.

(GK/BMcC)