Danny Truell is not your typical endowment fund manager. The ex-Goldman Sachs banker behind The Wellcome Trust’s mooted £10 billion-plus joint bid for Alliance Boots with Terra Firma was appointed chief investment officer of the medical research charity in 2005.

Since then, his use of highly leveraged and risky private equity and hedge fund investments, as well as some outspoken views on the dangers of overtaxing private equity firms, have made him stand out from the usually staid world of charity investment.

Mr Truell worked for Goldman for nine years before joining Wellcome — most recently as a managing director of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Previously, he worked in similar roles for Warburg, having begun his career at CIN Management as an Asian portfolio manager.

At Wellcome he is following an investment model developed by the endowment funds of America’s Yale and Harvard universities, which have amassed enormous wealth in part through aggressive trading strategies in alternative assets such as commodities.

A highly leveraged bid for a leading FTSE company such as Alliance Boots would be a new departure, both for Wellcome and for the world of endowment investments.

Yet the Wellcome Trust, an independent research-funding charity established under the will of the pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936 has a tradition of innovation. Its American-born founder was a pioneer in tropical medicine and the aim of the trust is to promote research with the intention of improving human and animal health. Among recent investments, the trust has helped to fund the sequencing of the human genome at the Sanger Institute, as well as the development of the antimalarial drug artemisinin. It spends more than £400 million a year and is the second-largest fund of its kind in the world, after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 1986 it sold 25 per cent of Wellcome stock to the public and in 1995 sold off the remaining stock to Glaxo to create GlaxoWellcome, which went on to form the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. The trust also has an extensive art collection and library.

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