The Scottish Government has shared details of a £6 million investment to be made as part of the Accelerated National Innovations Adoption (ANIA) programme, supporting innovation across conditions including type 2 diabetes and stroke, and for babies born with rare genetic conditions.
£4.5 million will be invested over three years in a national digital intensive weight management programme to support 3,000 people recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, with hopes of achieving remission in around 40 percent of patients by the end of their first year. The programme is set to recruit its first patients in January 2026, with participants to receive online support from dieticians and coaches looking to “reintroduce healthy, nutritious food to their diet to maintain weight loss”.
Professor Mike Lean, clinical senior research fellow and honorary consultant (medicine) at the University of Glasgow, highlighted that: “Providing a proven pathway to remission for 3,000 people, using a digital programme to people in their own homes, is a very significant step forward, and a statement of intent from the Scottish Government.”
A further £1.1 million has been designated to testing recent stroke patients “to determine if they have a genetic variation that impairs the benefits of a drug commonly prescribed to reduce the risk of secondary stroke”; whilst another £800,000 will be used to offer genetic testing for newborn babies to help identify a genetic variation which places them at risk of permanent hearing loss “if they are treated with a common emergency antibiotic”.
Neil Gray, Cabinet Secretary for Health, spoke of the “life changing effects” of these programmes for patients, adding: “Innovation is transforming healthcare and delivering medical benefits for the people of Scotland and the NHS, which will see reduced pressures as a direct result of projects just like these.”
Funding for innovation in health and care
Applications have opened for the British Heart Foundation’s Healthcare Innovation Fund, looking to develop ways to transform the delivery of services for people with cardiovascular disease. The fund is looking for ideas that identify unmet needs that require “further scoping and consensus building” around potential solutions, that have been “scoped by an appropriate group of stakeholders and are ready to be tested and evaluated in practice”, or that have already been tested locally and are ready to be scaled.
SBRI Healthcare and NIHR i4i have launched a venture capital readiness programme to support female founders to scale their innovations across health and social care. Offering a six-month programme designed for female founders to access the tools, networks, and knowledge required, the programme aims to support those tackling healthcare challenges with an innovative solution.
The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has confirmed £4.16 million in innovation zone funding for children’s healthcare innovation at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. The funding is supporting the development of a Paediatric Open Innovation Zone designed to develop, test and deploy technologies to tackle “some of the biggest health challenges faced by children and young people in the region”.
Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a contract worth £275,000 to London-based Physitrack PLC for the provision of an exercise prescription software service. The platform is said to enable physiotherapists to create “customised home exercise programs” with “easy-to-follow” videos to promote adherence, pain tracking, and progress monitoring features. According to the company’s website, it covers “over 18,000 exercises” across categories such as musculoskeletal, women’s health and pregnancy, and senior health.
