UK Technology Strategy Board announces new £55 million infectious disease programme
This article was originally published in Scrip
The UK Technology Strategy Boardhas launched a new £55 million programme to invest in the development of new technology to tackle infectious diseases.
The Detection and Identification of Infectious Agents (DIIA) innovation platform will seek to examine how new technology may be developed to reduce the number of deaths and cases of illness caused by infectious diseases.
The Technology Strategy Board will invest £10 million a year for five years, while the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) will invest between £500,000 and £1 million a year over the same period for the programme.
The departments of health and the environment also contributed to the establishment of the platform by assessing the scale of the problem, the cost if it were not addressed, performance specifications and potential market sizes in both the UK and the rest of the world.
The platform will focus on key areas including research into rapid diagnostic tests and point of care (POC) devices for the detection and identification of infectious agents, both in humans and animals. The findings could hold global potential; infectious diseases account for over a fifth of deaths worldwide, leading to high demand for new disease detection and identification technology, the board said.
In the UK, the platform could also help reduce NHS expenditure – over a third of all GP consultations in England are related to infectious disease, which cause around 10% of deaths. NHS spending on infectious diseases totals £6 billion each year.
pilot procurement
A health pilot competition was designed to help early-stage businesses to focus on and develop technologies to tackle healthcare associated infections.
The competition was designed by various agencies to encourage the delivery of leading-edge technologies and products for government needs ahead of commercial procurement, and provides a phased procurement programme to support technology developments through demonstration and trial.
The competition focuses on specific topics for development, including hand hygiene (technologies to improve hand hygiene effectiveness in hospital wards) and pathogen detection in the hospital environment (to produce a test for product residue that gives rapid results, allowing immediate corrective action, and can also be performed on wards without the need of a laboratory).
Entrants for each project will be selected via an open competition process, with developments 100% funded. Suppliers will retain intellectual property from the project, although certain rights of use will be retained by the department of health. The competition is now open.