Innovate UK’s core budget for the financial year 2016/17 April to March is £561m. The Health and Life Sciences programme has been allocate approximate 21% of the budget.
Innovate UK’s Health and Life Sciences sector group has a focus on agriculture and food and healthcare, underpinned by technologies developed in bioscience and medical research and enabled by expertise in engineering and physical sciences.
Innovate UK will:
- Run two broad Health and Life Sciences competitions during the year
- Run competitions aligned to the development of new technologies for manufacturing cell therapy products
- Continue to fund the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult
- Aim to complete the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Manufacturing Centre in Stevenage
- Complete the establishment of the Precision Medicine and Medicines Discovery Catapults
- Open the new Precision Medicine Catapult headquarters in Cambridge
- Continue funding the agri-tech centres as part of industrial strategy
Priority activities for Health and Life Sciences:
- Precision medicine: capturing value in the UK in therapeutic, diagnostics, algorithm and data companies and demonstrators with the NHS
- Advanced therapies (cell, gene and other therapies): capturing value from therapeutics development and manufacturing
- Preclinical technologies: addressing pharmaceutical preclinical productivity challenges, including capturing more value for UK contract research organisations by validation of potential technologies
- Improving agriculture productivity: through, for example, new breeding technologies, improved control of pests, weeds and pathogens and the increased uptake of robotics/autonomous systems, satellites, sensors and photonics
- Enhanced food quality: developing high-value, healthy, nutritious foods of known provenance by supporting the reduction of salt, sugar and fat; increasing fibre and bio-fortification and developing new proteins
- Biosciences: exploiting the outputs of bioscience and biomedical research will underpin many new products and services across the bio-economy. Gene editing, synthetic biology and analytical technologies will create the bedrock on which many new health and
agri-food products will be developed