UK to Invest up to £2.8M in Bioscience Research

News Apr 17, 2014

The Technology Strategy Board, Invest Northern Ireland (Invest NI) and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) are to invest up to £2.75m in collaborative feasibility studies to stimulate innovation across four technology areas that will enable and underpin UK growth: advanced materials; biosciences; electronics, sensors and photonics, and information and communications technology (ICT).

Projects will be led by a small or micro company, in collaboration with one or more business or research partners, with expected costs of £50k to £150k and last from six to 15 months.

The bioscience proposals should be focused on one or more of the specific elements below:

Characterisation and discovery tools

commercial application of sequencing technologies focusing on genomics
integration and exploitation of phenotyping technologies
integration of 'omics technologies, such as integrating metabolomic, proteomic, genomic and phenomic data collection and interpretation capabilities
biological imaging systems, biosensors, probes/ markers, diagnostic platforms.

Production and processing

metabolic engineering
novel manufacturing processes for biological products and novel biological production systems
formulation and delivery approaches for biological products, including biopharmaceuticals and functional foods.

Bioinformatics

approaches to organising, filtering and interpreting biological data, including biological system modelling, data visualisation and user-centred design.

Projects should be focused on early-stage technical opportunities that:

contain a significant level of technical risk, in that there is some level of uncertainty about how the proposed technical approach will work in practice
involve companies carrying out most (if not all) of the research in-house. Projects should build a technical evidence base to enable progression to larger-scale projects.

This competition opens on 6 May 2014, and the deadline for applications is noon on 25 June 2014.

Neural Computer Hears Like Humans

News

Modelling the human senses is an incredibly complex task. Our brains arrange cells into complex hierarchies that process information from our surroundings. Now, a group at MIT have created a model of the human auditory cortex that can hear sounds and music in the same way that humans do.

An Artificial Mole As An Early Warning Sign

News

ETH researchers have developed an early warning system for the four most common types of cancer. Should a tumour develop, a visible mole will appear on the skin.

"Genetic Jenga" Helps Understand How Our Genes Control Our Cells

News

To fully understand how our cells work, we can't focus on just one gene, but must instead look at combinations of genes. Researchers have published a study which knocked out multiple genes, like removing bricks from a Jenga tower, to better understand how they work together.