UK Funding Opportunities for Life Sciences 

Life Sciences Scotland is delighted to see a number of Scottish life science companies recently being awarded Innovate UK funding, including Synpromics, MGB Biopharma, and RoslinCT, but we would like to see more Scottish applications to Innovate UK. This blog explains the background to the Innovate UK funding linked to the UK industrial strategy and how to find out about all the funding available.  We strongly encourage you to make capitalise of this source of R&D funding and to use the application support provided by KTN and Scottish Enterprise to maximise the success of your applications. 

 In Autumn 2016 the UK government announced a renewed focus on industrial strategy and pledged an extra £4.7bn of funding for R&D over 4 years. Since then, InnovateUK has begun offering more grants directly to industry as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.  

These funds are designed to align to the four Grand Challenges that the government identified in its Industrial Strategy: 

1.                    Artificial intelligence 

2.                    Clean growth 

3.                    Mobility 

4.                    Ageing society 

Read the Industrial Strategy here. 

All four of these challenges are wide ranging but those focussed on Artificial Intelligence and our Ageing society are of particular relevance to the life sciences industry in Scotland.  

You can search open funding opportunities online – Search here. 

For information on the current Open Programme funding competition round 1 – for all sectors click here.

To find out about opportunities and events in advance, and to get the latest news, you can visit the Knowledge Transfer Network website and sign up for their newsletter – Sign up here. 

Finally, Scottish Enterprise has a team dedicated to supporting Scottish companies to secure InnovateUK funding. You can drop them an email once you’ve identified an opportunity to see how they can help. Email – Liam.Angus@scotent.co.uk