Investment in research and innovation are vital to improving healthcare, from faster diagnoses for cancer to personalised medicine. We’re announcing significant new investments in healthcare research across the UK to accelerate the development of new technologies that can improve people’s lives.
First, we’re announcing five new Healthcare Research and Partnership Hubs, bringing together academia, industry and charities to improve population health, transform disease prediction and diagnosis, and accelerate the development of new interventions.
Each hub, funded via EPSRC and partners, will deliver a world-leading research programme focused on advancing and developing novel engineering and physical sciences research. And to ensure their research has maximum impact each hub will work with patients, people with lived experience and health professionals.
Their work will include developing tech such as:
- robotic clothing that ‘puts itself on and takes itself off’
- creating low-cost, portable devices to detect the early signs of cancer
- developing a new approach for the administration of drugs for conditions - requiring regular medication, from high blood pressure to diabetes and asthma
- speeding up and reducing the time required to bring new drugs to market by testing using microdosing
- overcoming barriers to the use of mesenchymal stem cells to help tissue regeneration to repair broken bones and in chemotherapy.
We’re also, via Medical Research Council, supporting the MANIFEST consortium, led by The Francis Crick Institute, to support the better targeting of immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer.
MANIFEST will examine biomarkers present in patients before they start immunotherapy, as the first step towards developing tests that can monitor these biomarkers during treatment. These tests could help indicate if a given treatment is likely to work, helping doctors to personalise immunotherapy treatments to individual patients.
And Innovate UK have announced the remaining six winners of the latest Advancing Precision Medicine funding call, including projects to better diagnose cancers.
This announcement comes ahead of the International Investment Summit next week, which will showcase how key sectors like life sciences drive investment into the UK. More details at ukri.org, or on EPSRC, Innovate and MRC’s channels.
Professor of Science Policy at University of Exeter | Senior Adviser to Governments and International Organisations | Scientist | AI and Data Ethics | Governance | Policy | Global Citizen | SDG Volunteer and Advocate
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