InnovationPartnership ITMAT Funding Call 2017 – Awards
Earlier this year the NIHR Imperial BRC Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (ITMAT) issued two internal funding calls for proposals. Entitled “Push for Impact” and “Developing Capacity”, these calls were aimed at innovative, hypothesis-driven projects that would deliver clinically-focused outputs by exploiting the resources and capabilities within ITMAT (genomic sequencing, informatics, metabolic phenotyping, imaging and the Clinical Research Facility). The “Push for Impact” call aims to support high-impact translational research projects for a maximum of 2 years and cost up to £150,000. The “Developing Capacity” call provides seed funding to support researchers at the level of late-stage Clinical Research Fellow, Clinical Lecturer or early stage Lecturer within the BRC, providing a boost to promising projects by facilitating the generation of additional evidence to support follow-on applications to external funders. These smaller-scale projects will be funded for 12 months, providing up to £25,000 per project.
This year, 6 projects from each call were selected for funding, most of which plan to engage with more than one ITMAT core facility and have cross-departmental investigator teams. Congratulations to the successful applicants (below), who started their projects on 1st October 2017:
Push for Impact Awards
| Paul | Bentley | Neurological-Observations Assistant in Healthcare (NOAH) |
| John | Chambers | Discovery And Validation Of Novel Protein-Based Biomarkers For The Early And Accurate Diagnosis Of Acute Coronary Syndromes |
| Suraiya | Dubash | Evaluating the role of 68Ga-PSMA PET in detecting residual intraprostatic disease following systemic treatment in prostate cancer |
| Michael | Levin | Identification of the causative agent of Kawasaki Disease through metagenomic sequencing |
| Claire | Shovlin | Nonsense read-through topical therapies for patients with inherited genetic diseases: Proof of concept studies in hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia |
| James | Ware | Defining the landscape of non-coding regulatory variation in cardiomyopathy |
Developing Capacity Awards
| Santosh | Atanur | Functional characterisation of non-coding variants underlying intellectual disability |
| Isabel | Garcia Perez | Assessing the impact of a healthy and an unhealthy diet on gut microbial metabolites |
| Lesley | Hoyles | Metagenomics: Assessment of Routine Methods And Later Analysis (MARMALAde) |
| Ben | Jones | The role of receptor trafficking in human incretin physiology |
| Christopher | Rhodes | Understanding the metabolic functions of the lung |
| Maria | Yanez Lopez | Implementation and application of novel magnetic resonance imaging methods for neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration |
ITMAT is a virtual centre built around a number of core BRC-funded technology platforms across Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. More information on the two ITMAT funding calls can be found here:
