UK charitable trust aims to raise £100m for medical research through information-sharing

A UK-based charitable trust is offering to freely share its extensive due diligence on the projects it funds to make it easier for co-donors to give to effective medical research projects. By sharing the information through a new website and brochure, Rosetrees Charitable Trust hopes to encourage co-donors to contribute an extra £100m to the field.

The trust provides funding for over 100 projects from across the medical research spectrum, largely in the UK but also internationally. It has already given around £1m in seed corn funding, to support researchers at an early stage in their work, to leverage further donations from other donors. This has enabled those researchers to subsequently raise over £22m in funding from major grant-makers. It hopes that opening up access to the detailed information it collects will have “an enormous impact on life-enhancing and saving discoveries”, according to trustee Steve Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum says Rosetrees can encourage co-donors by providing them with detailed information that would otherwise be hard and expensive to gather. He hopes that this will lead to better and quicker results because researchers will have more time to devote to research rather than having to provide information to lots of donors separately.

“Professors can spend more than half of their time raising money to support their research team, which is a waste of their intellectual talents” Rosenbaum says. “It’s due to a lack of adequate government funding for medical research.”

Co-donors can choose the areas of medicine they wish to support and be given more information about relevant projects. As well as an introduction and explanation of the research, six-monthly clear, one-page summaries and site visits to see researchers are available.

Rosenbaum is the grandson of Rosetrees founders Nat and Teresa Rosenbaum, who established the trust in 1987 to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.

For further information on this opportunity, including a brochure, please contact John Samuels, trust administrator, at +44 (0)020 8952 1414. The Trust also aims to launch in the near future a new website listing all its funded projects.