This is a broad theme encompassing the development, scale up and manufacture of new human and animal therapies and the diagnostics required to bettr target both new and existing therapies, and to monitor bacterial pathogen spread.
Deadline: 4th June 2015
This call is supported by the MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC and ESRC
- refresh the pipeline for human and animal antibiotics;
- develop new non-drug based treatments for bacterial infections (vaccines, immunotherapies, probiotics, prebiotics, phages, amongst others);
- improve the efficacy of existing drugs through effective dosing strategies to minimise development of resistance and/or develop more targeted delivery methods;
- accelerate the scale-up and manufacture of novel antibiotics and vaccines;
- underpin the development of rapid, point of care diagnostics to enable the most appropriate therapy/intervention to be chosen;
- develop innovative diagnostics data linkages for community settings to monitor spread; and
- consider the real world issues that will affect the development and utilisation of new treatments and diagnostic
Applicants are now invited to submit proposals that will address one or more of these challenges in a multidisciplinary way. We would expect research proposals to incorporate relevant cross-disciplinary expertise spanning the remits of at least two of the Research Council partners. Disciplines that could be involved, but is not limited to include: bacteriology, drug development and delivery, chemistry, synthetic biology, materials science, informatics and computational modelling, mathematics, engineering and social science.
Partnership between industry and academia is actively encouraged to accelerate the translation of novel therapies and diagnostics. Where appropriate, the social and economic aspects of developing new antibacterials and diagnostics could be incorporated into a multidisciplinary approach.
Given the complexity of the research challenges and the need to develop new partnerships and collaborations, MRC - on behalf of the research councils - invited interested parties to a series of workshops. The purpose of these workshops was to encourage innovative thinking, networking and development of proposals amongst attendees with relevant experience, but who may not have previously worked in this area. The workshops took place in London (November 2014/December 2015). Outcomes from the workshops (reports to be available soon) fed into the development of this call.