SBRI Healthcare has awarded £1 million to 11 innovations tackling antimicrobial resistance, as part of its “Competition 25: AMR” phase 1 development funding competition.
As part of the competition, projects will run for “up to six months” with the aim of demonstrating technical and commercial feasibility for innovative ideas including novel POC testing, AI-enabled testing, and the use of UV-C LED technology for disinfection.
Selected projects will also be sponsored to undergo the NICE Metatool, “to help optimise their approach to addressing gaps in development plans and evidence generation, and to identify the potential next steps to bring their product to market”.
Imperial College London has been awarded £100,000 to develop its MagMove Assisted RNA Purification and Lateral flow Evaluation (MARPLE) project, a point-of-care diagnostic platform utilising mRNA biomarkers to “rapidly differentiate bacterial from viral infections in under 10 minutes”.
Mackwell Health Limited has received £99,738 to help evidence the potential for its UV-C high-level disinfection equipment using LEDs, including in creating CO2e savings; while Seroxo Limited’s SAMuRAI-LIT finger-prick POC blood test which assesses “real-time neutrophil function through a patented 10-minute assay” has been awarded £99,358 to improve its reader and reagents.
Vitec Microgenix Limited’s technology, designed to “continuously” kill microbes on surfaces and in the air, has also been awarded £53,409 to support the development of a clinical trial to demonstrate efficacy.
Other innovations awarded a share of funding include a portable device capable of identifying bacterial infection from a drop of blood in less than 20 minutes; a rapid POC “antibiotic susceptibility” test for UTIs; and an automated system to extract bacteria from positive blood cultures for “ultra-rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing” in 3 hours.
Verena Stocker, director of innovation, research, life sciences and strategy for NHS England, highlighted how the 11 projects were selected for funding based on their potential to “make a big difference” in tackling antimicrobial resistance, adding: “By supporting the most promising innovations, the NHS will continue to evolve, helping to meet more patients’ needs and encouraging more innovators to come forward with innovative ideas that benefit all.”
Innovation from across the health sector
NICE announced proposals to “shake-up” its health tech programme, to change how medical devices, diagnostics and digital and AI health technologies are evaluated. Said to enable more products to undergo evaluation, the proposals suggest a process that involves “multi-tech assessments of products”, with an aim to support purchasing decision making when multiple solutions are for the same purpose and to “remove the requirement for medical devices to be cost saving for them to be recommended”.
SBRI Healthcare also awarded £3 million to four innovations for children and young people’s health, including a handheld CO2 sensor for asthma, a digital biomarker for epilepsy, a digital health passport for epilepsy, and a non-invasive continuous glucose monitor for diabetes. Initially awarded funding for Phase 1 of the SBRI programme focusing on establishing technical and commercial viability; the four projects selected for Phase 2 will undergo 12 months of development and prototype evaluation, “prior to real-world implementation”.
HTN explored some of the latest around digital and technology in our latest news in brief article, which explored a collaboration between University Hospitals Dorset and Bournemouth University is aiming to identify volatile organic compounds (VOCs) specific to skin cancers, and develop a device capable of detecting them. Also featured was a study from The Royal Marsden testing the use of robotic guidance in taking multiple biopsies across different parts of a single tumour, with biopsies “analysed whilst still in the human body”.
