UK: Call for bids for £150M health funding

Funding opportunity

The Health Innovation Challenge Fund (HICF), a £100 million, five-year fund set up by the research charity the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department of Health, is looking for applications for the next round of grants, which closes on October 1.

The theme of this third round of funding is monitoring of chronic illness in the home and remote settings.

The aim of the fund is to stimulate the creation of healthcare products, technologies and interventions. The HICF will have a succession of thematic calls for proposals, each selected to focus on unmet needs in healthcare relevant to the UK National Health Service (NHS), and will support innovative developments that are within three to five years of launch or adoption.

Priorities for the HICF are:

• encourage innovative products for patient benefit;

• improve the uptake of new technological advances into patient management pathways;

• integrate the clinical, research, informatics and product development communities.

The lead applicant for HICF awards must be a UK organisation or company. The following types of organisation (singly or in collaboration) will be eligible for funding:

• start-up companies founded to capture and develop intellectual property of relevance to healthcare;

• biotechnology, pharmaceutical, bioinformatics, engineering or other companies;

• NHS organisations, including NHS Trusts and NHS Foundation Trusts, and equivalent UK authorities;

• universities, and research institutes and not-for profit organisations

A collaboration between two or more of the entities detailed above is also eligible and encouraged where it strengthens the overall proposal.

The deadline for preliminary applications is October 1, 2010.

For more information, visit: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Technology-transfer/Awards/Health-Innovation-Challenge-Fund/index.htm