LONDON - The government backed plans on Wednesday to build a new 500 million pound medical research centre in London to bring together the country's best scientists.

The government has agreed to sell land in central London to a consortium planning the new UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation, the consortium said.

Several developers had made rival bids to buy the site, near the British Library and St. Pancras station, the new home of high-speed rail services to Europe.

"We strongly support plans to create Europe's leading centre for medical research in the heart of London," Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a statement.

"It will maintain Britain's position at the forefront of global medical research, strengthen the UK economy and ... has huge potential to change patients' lives," he said.

The centre, expected to open at the end of 2013 and to employ 1,500 people, will have state-of-the-art scientific facilities, the consortium said in a statement.

Research there will lead to new treatments that the National Health Service will be able to trial and adopt, it said.

The project is backed by the publicly funded Medical Research Council, the charity Cancer Research UK, University College London and The Wellcome Trust, Britain's largest charity which supports biomedical research.

The centre will bring together researchers from the first three institutions while The Wellcome Trust will fund scientists working there.

Paul Nurse, president of New York's Rockefeller University and winner of the Nobel prize for medicine in 2001, will lead the scientific planning of the centre.

The centre aims to work on developing treatments for diseases such as cancers, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, meningitis, tuberculosis and viruses such as 'flu and HIV.

A spokesman for the Medical Research Council said the government's agreement to sell the London site to the consortium was "absolutely crucial" to the project going ahead.

The consortium did not say how much it paid for the site.

Cancer Research UK's chief executive, Harpal Kumar, said the new centre would "accelerate our understanding of cancer".

"Cancer has a huge impact on all of us -- it affects one in three of the UK population -- so it is important that we aim the best scientific minds at this challenge," he said.