The aim of this competition is to award innovation projects that focus on novel digital and data-enabled tools to:

• more accurately diagnose conditions and stratify patients to the most appropriate treatments
• increase the application of integrated and multi-modal approaches to determine risk and diagnosis and to predict prognostic outcomes.

Your project must demonstrate how it addresses an unmet clinical need or responds to NHS demand signalling.

Your proposal can include:

• experimental evaluation, within a clinical environment
• prototyping
• product development planning
• intellectual property protection
• a demonstration of clinical utility and effectiveness
• regulatory planning

We encourage proposals for common chronic condition areas particularly:

• oncology
• cardiovascular disease
• musculoskeletal conditions
• respiratory disease

If your project intends to focus on a disease area not listed, you must provide justification by email to support@iuk.ukri.org at least 10 working days before the competition closes. We will decide whether to approve your request.

Portfolio approach
We want to fund a variety of projects across a range of common chronic conditions, themes, technological maturities and various geographical locations across the UK. We call this a portfolio approach.

Specific themes

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

• integrating clinical data sets or multi-omic data sources
• development of artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms and clinical decision-making tools to improve early detection, risk prediction, diagnosis, patient stratification, targeted treatments or prognostic outcomes
• identification of digital markers, potential targets or data-derived phenotypes to stratify patients to more effective therapies

The list is not intended to be exhaustive.

Research categories

We will fund industrial research projects and experimental development projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

Projects we will not fund

We are not funding projects that are:

• digital technologies to improve healthcare system delivery
• approaches that do not specifically and directly aim to improve diagnostic precision or stratified treatment of a specified chronic health condition
• a development of broad-based diagnostics and therapeutics

We cannot fund projects that are:

• dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
• dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product