The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has, over recent years, quietly added to its portfolio of “interdisciplinary” research topics. Perhaps more surprising, the Wellcome Trust, previously focussed on infectious diseases, is climbing aboard the bandwagon.
The latest manifestation of this phenomenon comes in the latest joint announcement from the two organisations, £45 million ‘Engine for Healthcare Innovation’ to Boost UK Medical Engineering. This tells us that:
The initiative will provide funding for a number of multidisciplinary centres of excellence within the UK, bringing together experts in the fields of the physical and engineering sciences with those in the clinical and life sciences with the aim of developing innovative solutions for healthcare.
These are two of the UK’s largest researcher funders. Each year they hand out a total of £1.4 billion for research and related activities.
The key bit about the new initiative is summed up in this bit of the announcement:
The Medical Engineering initiative will provide funding to enable academic institutions to engage in applied research for healthcare. It will also improve the integration of expertise in the public and private sectors so that innovations arising in academia are harnessed effectively by the healthcare industry and aided through the process of regulation, commercialisation and distribution for patient benefit.
This initiative could be good news for the innovation community. The UK has excellent medical research and an NHS system that, in theory, but only in theory, is a great test-bed for new techniques and instruments. An initiative like this might just help to wake up the NHS.
The real challenge will come when the time is ripe for the commercialisation of this sort of work. Medical technologies still have to go through clinical trials and regulatory hoops, but the barriers are a lot lower than they are for drugs development. It doesn’t have to take a decade and cost a billion €uros before the profits can flow.
