The Tropical Infectious Disease Consortium (TIDC) has been awarded MRC Confidence in Concept (CiC) funding for 2020. TIDC is a strategic partnership between LSTM, Public Health England (PHE), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Jenner Institute, Oxford. The award will allow the Consortium to support pump-priming projects, typically in the range of £50K, with the overarching ambition to accelerate the transition from discovery science into therapeutic, diagnostic and vaccine development.
Professor Giancarlo Biagini, Academic lead for LSTM’s Centre for Drugs and Diagnostics, and Co-I within the Consortium said: “Since its establishment in 2013, the TIDC has gone from strength to strength . In the last six years the awards, totalling around £3.5M, have leveraged ca. £45M in follow-on funding from both UK and international sources. More importantly, we are now seeing tangible outputs in terms of impact from these awards which is a testament to the high calibre of researchers and partnerships within the TIDC.”
The translational research projects funded to date span a wide range of areas including new drugs and diagnostics, new and optimised vaccines, vector-control products as well as other intervention tools. Projects have also directly contributed to one spin-out company, 15 patent applications and one trademark. These outputs confirm the research excellence of the research teams and their ability to expand and accelerate product development for tropical infectious diseases. Significantly, the majority of the supported projects involve direct partnership with industrial and non-academic partners located in both the Global North and Global South.
The scheme will be launching in the late spring of 2020, details will be posted here when they become available. More information on the MRC CiC scheme can be found here.
