Advancing innovation in accelerated cancer diagnosis

Overview

Innovate UK, on behalf of the Office for Life Sciences’ Cancer Healthcare Goals programme, will invest up to £25.4 million in collaborative R&D projects supporting the clinical validation and evaluation of early cancer diagnostic technologies and devices.

The competition aims to accelerate the development of diagnostic innovations that enable earlier cancer detection and diagnosis, with particular encouragement for projects addressing less common cancers.

Scope

Projects must focus on developing, validating or evaluating diagnostic technologies or approaches that demonstrate clear potential for clinical and health economic impact. Projects can generate robust evidence to support regulatory approval and future NHS adoption.

Projects can include:

• clinical validation and evaluation studies
• early phase clinical trials
• safety and efficacy testing
• technology demonstration in relevant and operational environments
• regulatory planning
• product development activities

Projects focusing on less common cancers are particularly encouraged. This includes any cancer that is not breast, prostate, lung or bowel cancer, including rare forms of those four cancer types.

Key themes and topics

Projects can focus on one or more of the following:

• Next generation diagnostic technologies and devices to drive earlier diagnosis of cancer, including less common cancers
• Novel technologies and devices that can improve patient access to diagnostic services by:
  • empowering patients and primary care teams to identify more people with early symptoms
  • enabling patients to receive an earlier diagnosis
  • reducing strain on services, including self-assessment tools, pharmacy-led triage and direct-to-test pathways
• Multi-modal approaches to assess an individual’s cancer risk by combining factors such as:
  • genomic data
  • demographic information
  • imaging
  • biomarkers
  • multianalyte combinations

This list is not exhaustive.

Projects will not be funded where they focus on:

• companion diagnostics
• therapeutics or treatment development
• discovery research
• routine deployment of late-stage technologies into frontline services
• technologies focused purely on service redesign
• cancer recurrence detection, monitoring or treatment response prediction

Project duration

Projects must:

• Last 24 to 36 months
• Must start on 1 April 2027
• End by 31 March 2030

Award value

Must have total project costs between £1.5 million and £4 million.

Funding rates

For industrial research projects, purposeful research that builds new knowledge and skills to improve or develop products, processes or services, often through prototypes or system components that validate ideas in realistic settings, organisations can get funding for eligible project costs of:

• up to 70% if they are a micro or small organisation
• up to 60% if they are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 50% if they are a large organisation

For experimental development projects, which use existing knowledge to shape and refine new or improved products, processes or services through prototyping, testing and validation, and are nearer to market, organisations can get funding for eligible project costs of:

• up to 45% if they are a micro or small organisation
• up to 35% if they are a medium-sized organisation
• up to 25% if they are a large organisation

Research organisations undertaking non-economic activity can share up to 50% of the total eligible project costs.

Eligibility criteria

• Projects must be collaborative and led by a UK registered business of any size, an academic institution or an NHS organisation
• Projects must include at least one UK-registered SME
• Collaborators can be a UK registered business of any size; an academic institution; a charity; a not for profit; a public sector organisation; or a research and technology organisation (RTO)
• Subcontractors must be preferably UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs. Overseas subcontractors can be used where applicants provide a clear justification for why a UK subcontractor cannot be used
• All funded project work must be carried out within the UK
• Projects must intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• Subsidy control and State aid rules apply through the Research, Development and Innovation Streamlined Subsidy Scheme under the Subsidy Control Act 2022