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Developing healthcare innovations: apply for business funding

UK businesses can apply to the Biomedical Catalyst for a share of up to £10 million to develop innovative products and processes to healthcare challenges.

Medical professionals in a corridor. Via Jacob Lund at Shutterstock.com

Funding is available for innovative healthcare products, technologies and processes.

The Biomedical Catalyst fund has up to £10 million to invest in innovative projects that tackle some of the biggest healthcare challenges in the world.

Better and more efficient

A growing and ageing population is creating a need for better, more efficient health services.

The fund is a partnership between Innovate UK and the Medical Research Council. It aims to support innovative ideas across the life sciences sector, to make ideas from research and academia a reality.

Support is available across disciplines

Funding support is available in any sector or discipline including:

  • stratified healthcare
  • advanced therapies, such as gene and cell therapies
  • diagnostics
  • medical technologies and devices

Projects should develop innovative healthcare products, technologies and processes. This could include projects that aim to:

  • prevent disease or manage chronic health conditions
  • detect or diagnose disease earlier
  • provide tailored treatments that change the underlying disease or offer cures

There are 2 funding competitions being run. These are for:

  • feasibility studies to explore and evaluate the commercial potential of early-stage ideas. Up to £2 million is available
  • early-stage projects to create sufficient data to support later testing of products in a clinical or other relevant setting. Up to £8 million is available

Competition information

  • the competitions open on 26 March 2018, and the deadline for applications is 6 June 2018
  • projects must be led by an SME, either working alone or with other SMEs or research organisations
  • we expect feasibility projects to have total costs of up to £200,000 and to last between 3 and 12 months
  • we expect early stage projects to have total costs of between £250,000 and £4 million and to last between 12 and 36 months
  • businesses could attract up to 70% of their project costs
  • a briefing event will be held on 4 April 2018

Updates to this page

Published 21 March 2018