The Tropical Infectious Disease Consortium is managing a MRC Confidence in Concept Award of £500,000 which can be allocated to individual projects that accelerate the transition from discovery science into therapeutic, diagnostic and vaccine development. The partners of the Consortium, LSTM; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; The Jenner Institute at Oxford University and Public Health England Microbiology Research Services in Porton Down, will jointly provide awards of up to £50,000 and allocated to eligible project proposals via an open, competitive and externally peer reviewed process.
‘The fund is intended to accelerate relevant translational activities’, says LSTM’s Giancarlo Biagini, a senior manager within the Consortium. ‘Applicants should therefore aim to provide sufficient preliminary data to establish the viability of their proposed approach and show whether there is a market need for the foreseen outputs so that it provides confidence in the underlying concept. Ideally that should lead to more substantive funding from external funders’, he continued.
Projects within the following categories are eligible to apply:
- Diagnostics
- Therapeutics
- Vaccines
- Vector Control Tools
- Translational focused Informatics
- Translational enabling technologies
Eligible projects should be at the stage whereby allocated funding by the Consortium would develop the approach to the next level where it would be capable of successfully applying for larger external translational funding sources such as the MRC DPFS. It is the objective of Tropical Infectious Disease Consortium to create a critical mass necessary for UK researchers who are interested in translating their research into health benefits, which will support them in an increasingly competitive international market. The aim is to support a high number of scientifically excellent translational proposals.
The applications should be in before 4 April 2014 and more information, including the selection criteria and application forms, can be found here.