Innovative Engineering for Health Partnership: Wellcome Trust and EPSRC offer £30m
The Wellcome Trust and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have announced the Innovative Engineering for Health partnership, a joint £30 million initiative to find biomedical engineering solutions to challenging healthcare problems. The programme recognises the important role that engineering and the physical sciences have played in many of the most significant advances in healthcare in our time.
According to the scheme:
The Wellcome Trust and the EPSRC are looking to support a limited number of innovative, multidisciplinary projects designed to address a defined need in healthcare for which current solutions are inadequate or lacking. Priority will be given to projects with the potential to impact on particularly intractable problems in medicine or public health using exciting engineering concepts. Projects must address the full translation pathway from high-quality basic research through to adoption into practice, together with full analysis of routes to market.
Bids should be directed towards a major problem in healthcare or public health, with priority given to difficult areas for which solutions are not obvious given the current state of technology. Out of scope will be proposals designed to further the development of an existing technology in a particular therapeutic area, or that are focused on technology development in its own right, rather than in the context of solving a defined healthcare objective.
The outcomes of the proposals should be translational and will be expected to include clear and credible strategies for adoption of the research into clinical or public health practice. Proposals will need to include a full analysis of the technology’s route to market.
The £30 million initiative is expected to fund three or four projects of up to £10 million pounds each over seven years.
Prospective applicants are required to contact the Wellcome Trust for feedback on their proposed concept. The deadline for preliminary applications is 10th December 2012.
Further information is available on the website of the Wellcome Trust here. The announcement is here.