Jersey couple donates £1m to Southampton medical research centre

A Jersey couple has donated £1 million toward a campaign to build a pioneering medical research centre in Southampton.

The Institute for Medical Innovation will be a world-leading facility designed to get life-changing treatment to patients faster, with a focus on cancer, dementia, sight loss, infection and respiratory and allergic conditions

The £100 million project is backed by a £50 million commitment from the university, with the remaining £50 million to be raised through its largest-ever fundraising campaign.

The university has already secured more than £11 million in donations, including significant sums from two Guernsey, residents announced last month:

Research centre at Southampton Hospital receives large Guernsey donation

The new facility will bring together the greatest minds in medicine, computer science and engineering under one roof to use the latest advances in AI, genomics and tissue analysis to accelerate the development of new treatments and enable earlier diagnosis.

The £1m donation from Jersey couple James and Mindy Vernon will fund the Digital Collaboration Hub in the Institute for Medical Innovation.

It will house high-performance computers and bioinformatics software and specialists centralising medical data from across the University and hospital in a secure research space.

 Professor Paul Elkington. Credit University of Southampton

Director of the IMI, Professor Paul Elkington, expressed his delighted at receiving the latest donation:

"The IMI will get life-changing treatments to patients faster. We know families are waiting and, while technology is advancing at pace, medical science must keep up."

Thousands of Jersey residents rely on Southampton for specialist care. In 2024/25 alone, more than 7,000 referrals from the island were made to Southampton, with a significant number being referred for cancer.

One person to have benefit from research already being undertaken in Southampton is islander Carly Silvester, who has lived with the most serious and life threatening form of asthma since childhood.

She was started on a treatment called Mepolizumab, which she says has completely changed her life.  Southampton researchers were instrumental in Mepolizumab’s development.

Carly told Channel 103:

"I actually ran the London Marathon this year, which is something I would never have dreamed of doing.

That's something I never would I have dreamed I would have been able to do.  Running London was a real personal journey for me, and really emotional actually."

The IMI will be fully operational by 2030.