GovWire

Innovate UK has up to 6 million to invest in technologies that will help businesses to understand and meet the challenges involved in developing personalised medicines.

What is precision medicine?

Precision medicine refers to better targeting of treatments to patients by combining clinical knowledge with advances in diagnostic techniques and data analysis. It is often called stratified or personalised medicine.

By delivering the right treatments to the right patients in the right way it should create better results.

Our focus

Organisations can apply for funding for feasibility studies and research and development projects.

Feasibility studies could include:

• helping healthcare providers understand the attractiveness of a concept including by determining patient and user needs, required changes to patient pathways, commissioning and procurement options, health economics and adoption drivers
• technical activities in areas such as developing prototypes and proofs of concept, collecting further data on use of biomarkers, and refining algorithms to improve patient stratification
• assessing technical success in areas such as analytical performance, and diagnostic sensitivity and specificity
• determining what information will need to be collated from a regulatory or health technology assessment

Research and development projects could focus on decision-making or take one or more of the following approaches:

• developing tools to better integrate informatics and data
• establishing precision medicine clinical trials
• developing rapid diagnostics to inform better treatment decisions

Competition information

• the competition is open, and the deadline for applications is midday on 25 October 2017
• feasibility projects must be led by an SME working alone or in partnership with other businesses or research and technology organisations
• we expect feasibility projects to have total costs of up to 100,000 and to last up to 12 months
• research and development projects can be led by a business or a research and technology organisation working with at least one partner and must involve at least one SME
• we expect research and development projects to have total costs of between 1 million and 2 million and last up to 24 months
• businesses can attract up to 70% of their total project costs
• a briefing event will be held on 20 September 2017

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