14th January 2015
Funding Call Deadline 6th February 2015: Wellcome Trust Pathfinder Awards
Funding Call Deadline Approaching: 6th February 2015
The Wellcome Trust is seeking to kick-start pilot projects that have significant potential to help develop innovative new products that address an unmet need in healthcare and offer a potential new solution. Pathfinder Awards fund innovative discrete pilot studies to develop assets and de-risk future development.
We aim both to support discrete projects for eligible organisations and to stimulate partnerships:
- Academic and commercial organisations in the UK or the Republic of Ireland can apply for individual awards.
- Partnerships between academic and commercial entities, based anywhere in the world, can also apply. We envisage that an academic (or not-for-profit) lead with an early-stage programme will build on or establish a partnership with a company that has specialist knowledge and access to technologies to facilitate the development of a specific novel product (see ‘Partnerships’).
Priorities for Pathfinder Award funding include (in no particular order):
- Discrete high-quality experiments to demonstrate proof-of-concept data assay development
- IP development for a critical experiment to validate IP (in strong cases)
- Stimulating product development that could ultimately improve the outlook for patients with orphan and neglected diseases
- Encouraging effective partnership between a public sector applicant (academic or not-for-profit entity) and a company partner (see ‘Partnerships’).
There should be a strong discrete project focus (not a pipeline or undefined future scope of work).
For all Pathfinder Awards, the concept to be tested must be at an early stage, so an application for a more substantial award through other Innovations funding schemes would be unlikely to succeed. However, the concept must not be at too early a stage. At the end of the award, the innovation should be a credible asset ready to be developed further, and the applicant should be competitive for more substantial Innovations funding or able to bridge the gap to facilitate product development with a downstream partner.
Pathfinder Awards will not support:
- Target validation
- ‘Blue skies’ or curiosity-driven research
- Late-stage programmes already developed to a point where funding from commercial or venture sources could readily be sought to complete the pathway to market
- Programmes already fully funded