Furthering the Enterprise agenda

The Faculty were delighted to be awarded two MRC grants which will further the Enterprise agenda.  Both are awarded with the aim of translating our high quality basic research to the clinic and are designed to fund translation rather than basic discovery. 

The MRC Confidence in Concept grant will fund projects of around £50k to perform proof of concept type experiments.  The board to evaluate these applications includes individuals from the FoM, the wider University and also external advisors.  This will ensure that the highest quality of applications are selected and that they are at the correct stage of translation for the scheme.

The first round of applications has gone live and has a closing date of the 16^th of June.  We will run a number of rounds so, if you are not lucky first time round please try again.  We will endeavour to provide feedback on unsuccessful applications so that this can be an iterative process.   We now have a live UoS web page for guidance notes and application forms.

The second award is a proximity to discovery award.  Designed to support novel interactions between Academia and Industry this adds a further strand to “spinning-out” through the UoS Future Worlds scheme.   We now have additional dedicated MRC funding to support health-related activity within Future Worlds. Rob Read, Jay Lever, Richard Oreffo, Jon Dawson and Ying Cheong have all taken advantage of Future Worlds to date.  For more information on this and how to apply contact Brigitte Lavoie.

General notes on both these schemes and the MRC strategic priorities are available directly from the MRC website.

The basis behind both these awards is to translate our novel research discoveries for patient benefit.  It is important to remember to protect your discoveries through the mechanism of patenting.  This can be a rewarding experience, as patents can be licensed to third parties to generate an additional income stream for your research, as well as forming the basis of your blockbusting company.  Contact James Hamilton, our tech transfer officer if you have any great ideas that you want to protect.  He can advise on both the suitability of the project and also potential partners to make your ideas reality.  For instance we recently had the Venture capital team from the IP group down to scope our activities, and in the near future we are expecting further visits from GSK and Pfizer.  Contact James or Brigitte if you want to meet with either of these companies.

Good luck with the applications!

Professor Salim Khakoo