PEOPLE suffering from asthma, heart disease, leukaemia, breast cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's have benefited from the work of research charity Hope. Emma Barnett finds out more about the Southampton organisation as it celebrates its 25th anniversary...

SINCE its humble beginnings in 1977 Hope has raised more than £15m for medical research in the Wessex region and made more than 750 grants for medical research projects.

Developing better diagnosis and treatment for various cancers, helping trace the origins of heart disease, improving child health with new techniques to test babies' breathing and helping children with cerebral palsy to walk more easily are just some of the projects the charity has been involved in.

To mark its 25th year the organisation, which began life as the Wessex Medical Trust, has launched an ambitious £1m campaign called Hope for Healthy Babies.

The project aims to find a vaccine for meningitis B, learn more about how the health of a child is affected by the nourishment a baby receives in the mother's womb and to fund a series of smaller schemes on child health.

But all this is a far cry from when the organisation was first set up.

Founder Sir Donald Acheson, who now lives in London, said Hope was originally created for doctors in the Wessex region who were interested in doing research.

Sir Donald, who was appointed Dean of Southampton's new medical school in 1968, said he felt it was important for trainee doctors to have an apprenticeship.

"What we wanted was, when they came to the latter part of their training, when they were about to qualify, they would go all over the Wessex region and be apprenticed by consultants," he said.

"What we wanted was in response to this that they would also have an opportunity to do research. So the Wessex Medical Trust was set up specifically to receive donations which would help the doctors trained in Southampton.

"It was to provide a fund for people who wanted to do research throughout the Wessex region who were helping educate our medical students."

Since 1977 Hope has continued to grow and expand. In its first three years it raised £400,000 for medical research rising to £10m by 1997.

In 1988 Saints footballer Steve Mills set up a research fund bearing his name after being diagnosed with leukaemia, from which he later died.

A special football match at the Dell raised £95,000 for the charity and since his death The Steve Mills laboratory and treatment rooms have been opened at the Royal South Hants Hospital in Southampton.

Ray Kipling, director of Hope, explained where the money collected by the charity's five fundraising groups actually goes.

"We do grants at three different levels," he said.

"We try to raise quite big sums every now and then, like the Hope for Healthy Babies campaign. Every two or three years we will have a big campaign going.

"Then we do what we would call still fairly substantial grants, of about £50,000 a year. There's quite a lot of work you can get done for that. That will be in a different topic every year.

"We've got a campaign running to raise money for breast cancer, which is obviously very important, and we've got one running on obesity and diabetes."

Ray added: "The other bit we're doing, which we do quite a lot of, is giving relatively modest grants. They're still about £10,000 so it's still quite a bit of money.

"We give out those sums of money to start off projects. We call it our Innovation Fund, because we get quite new ideas. If you want to do a £1m project, that's too big for Hope, but you can't get £1m from anyone else unless you've proved that you're a good doctor, nurse, researcher or whatever.

"We will start people off. We've helped people get going that are now very successful. Liver disease, heart disease, cancer - we've started scientists in all these fields to get them off the ground."

Hope's Innovation Fund has received 45 applicants this year. The charity will only be able to fund ten of them, but Ray desperately wants to be able to give money to more projects.

"It's something that really makes a difference," he said.

"If you get a young scientist or a young doctor or a young nurse they've often got very good ideas because they're not set in a particular line of thought.

"They come up with a new line, a new idea, and that's when you get breakthroughs. If you start them off with that you might start a whole new line of inquiry going, and that's really quite exciting."

The biggest aim for Hope in the future is to raise more money for the work it does.

Ray said: "The biggest constraint we have is trying to raise more funds. If I could raise more money it could get more projects rolling and if you get more projects rolling, ultimately it will improve the health of people.

"We are setting up more fundraising groups. We need more fundraising groups to get the money in to pay for these things.

"My ambition is to raise as much money as ever I can. There's no shortage of medical research, but there's a shortage of money to fund it."

If you can help with fundraising for Hope call the charity on 023 8033 3366.