The government has today (14 June) announced plans to allow UK businesses to apply for funding via the Industry Strategy Challenge Fund initiative to increase manufacturing capacity of innovative genomic analysis technologies.
Innovate UK, as part of UK Research and Innovation, forms a section of the government’s Industry Strategy Challenge Fund, which will invest up to £5m in innovational projects. The grant comes after an effort to boost the commercial capacity to manufacture in real-time industry.
The grants are looking to invest in capital projects to allow existing facilities to scale-up for the manufacturing of such technologies. The government recognises the problems of scaling-up and wants to fund projects to tackle these obstacles.
The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund works to allow the UK’s world-leading research and business sectors to work cohesively and overcome the major industrial and societal challenges the industry faces. This also forms part of the government’s four-year £4.7bn investment into R&D in the UK.
Projects applying for the grant should focus on using funding to aid research infrastructures and ambitious innovation in genomic analysis technologies. An example of this is high throughput nucleic acid sequencing, an innovational tool used in quantitative trait gene cloning (QTG).
To be eligible for the fund, UK businesses must be:
- a UK based business of any size
- carry out your project in the UK
- work alone or in collaboration with others (for example businesses, research base and third sector)
- have a manufacturing facility for genomic analysis technologies
Projects should plan to run for a period of three to five months and total costs shouldn’t exceed £10m.
The competition will commence next Monday and entries will close midday on 11 July this year. Find out more and apply here.
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