The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has launched a new round of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, offering up to £5.5 million in total funding for innovation in critical sectors and helping support the delivery of the Plan for Change.
The latest round of funding is open to regulators and local authorities, looking to support projects such as AI in healthcare and smarter ways to test out new treatments. Lord Vallance, Science Minister, noted the importance of smarter and more agile regulation in helping business bring ideas to market faster. “These projects show how regulators can work with industry to unlock breakthroughs – from autonomous drones improving emergency services, to AI that cuts the cost and time spent on clinical trials,” he added.
In a previous phase, projects granted a share of the funding included a trial of drone deliveries for urgent medical supplies in Milton Keynes and an MHRA project exploring the use of synthetic data in clinical trials. Puja Myles, director of the Clinical Practice Research Datalink at the MHRA, highlighted how the grant had given the agency “a better understanding of the scenarios when synthetic data could be used to boost sample sizes of clinical trials”, adding “this project is part of the MHRA’s work to promote innovation and embrace emerging technologies in clinical trials, to help get new treatments to patients faster”.
An independent evaluation by the National Centre for Social Research published findings from this previous phase, noting immediate outcomes such as new approaches to designing and testing regulatory innovations like sandboxes, and the strengthening of relationships with regulatory authorities and innovators.
Innovation in health and care
SBRI Healthcare, in partnership with Lifted Ventures, has launched its first cohort of female founders and CEOs, joining its Innovation Investment Readiness programme. The six-month programme, expected to run from May to October 2025, has been introduced as an avenue for supplying female-led startups with the “tools, knowledge and networks to access funding and accelerate growth”. It also offers the chance to “build a targeted investment plan and roadmap, make connections with investors, and meet peers and other women leaders in health and social care”.
Google Health has launched a new open model for health app developers, described as its “most capable open model for multimodal medical text and image comprehension”, built on Gemma 3. Potential use cases include medical image classification, medical image interpretation, and medical text comprehension and clinical reasoning.
Health Innovation Hub Ireland (HIHI) has announced the launch of a new national initiative called HIHI.AI Call 2025, said to support the “development and testing of AI solutions that can make a real impact in Ireland’s healthcare system”. As part of the initiative, HIHI is looking for input from companies, startups, researchers, clinicians and industry leaders who are already focused on developing AI-powered healthcare solutions. Interested suppliers have been asked to take part in an AI in healthcare competition, leading to an opportunity to share and pilot their AI innovations in “real-world clinical settings”, while also having access to HIHI’s national support network.
