The Wellcome Trust and the EPSRC are looking to support a limited number of innovative, multi-disciplinary 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.
Awards of up to £10 million over 7 years will be considered, reflecting the scale of ambition that the initiative seeks to support.
Examples of the kind of challenging themes that the funding partners wish to address through novel thinking from the biomedical engineering community include:
- Engineering approaches to mental health, with particular emphasis on psychiatric conditions and mood disorders
- Solutions to facilitate neonatal and paediatric care that accommodate the challenges posed by growth and development
- Technologies with the potential to mitigate rare diseases (as defined by the FDA Office of Orphan Product Development or EU Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products), with special reference to solutions that can rectify an abnormality common to multiple disorders.
These broad themes are indicative only and proposals that address other areas of unmet need that would benefit from the application of novel approaches in engineering will also be welcomed.
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 closing date for applications is the 10th December 2012.
For further information, please visit the Welcome Trust website.