The Tropical Infectious Disease Consortium has announced the 11 successful projects that will be receiving an MRC Confidence in Concept Award of £500,000 in total to accelerate the transition from discovery science into therapeutic, diagnostic and vaccine development.
The Principal Investigators (PI) of the 11 successful projects have been selected from within the consortium made up of LSTM; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Jenner Institute at Oxford University and Public Health England Microbiology Services in Porton Down. The projects enable close collaboration within the consortium and with other institutions. The successful projects include AMR, potential novel vaccines for malaria and Zika, as well as antivenom, and new insecticide resistance and control tools.
The awards, of up to £50,000, were allocated to eligible projects that were at the stage where sufficient preliminary data is available to establish the viability of their proposed approach.
The successful projects were selected via an open, competitive and externally peer reviewed process. In addition to the consortium partner institutions, applications involve investigators from national and international organisations, industry and academia including the Universities of Liverpool, Warwick, Westminster, Oslo, etc.
“The fund is intended to accelerate relevant translational activities”, says LSTM’s Professor Giancarlo Biagini, a senior manager within the Consortium. “The objective of the Infectious Diseases Consortium is to create a critical mass necessary for UK researchers who are interested in working collaboratively in translating their research into health benefits that will support them in an increasingly competitive international market. We are hopeful that the projects now have the opportunity to get to the next level of development, where they would be capable of successfully applying for larger external funding sources”. The list of successful projects can be found here.