Proposals for early interventions and solutions to tangibly improve the care and long-term outcomes of patients who experience acute illness or sustained severe injury/trauma. Must demonstrate how the innovation will integrate into current pathways, and should offer a step-change improvement of the immediate treatment, care, transport and recovery of patients.

Health Innovation Challenge Fund: Trauma and Critical Care Medicine

The HICF is seeking early interventions and solutions that will tangibly improve the care and long-term outcomes of patients who experience acute illness or who have sustained severe injury or trauma. Proposals must demonstrate a clear plan on how the innovation will integrate into current pathways given the time pressures, complex logistics and multi-disciplines involved when responding to these emergencies. They should offer a step-change improvement of the immediate treatment, care, transport and recovery of patients. Applications should:

• focus on care given in either pre-hospital settings, emergency departments, trauma centres, intensive care units or high dependency units
• provide improved monitoring devices, innovative analytical or imaging modalities or rapid diagnostics
• develop non-invasive, point-of-care diagnostic devices to support early treatment intervention
• deliver better interventions for trauma or critically ill patients including e.g. optimising ventilation, pain control, more effective haemostatic therapies and devices, stabilisation of injuries, better wound care and improved surgical and non-surgical treatments
• offer solutions that will enable quick profiling and stratification of patients to allow targeted therapy to slow down or reverse secondary injuries

Specifically out of scope for this call:

• proposals focusing on hospital acquired infections
• non-critical care delivery following discharge from an ICU to a general ward

All proposals must meet the essential requirements of the HICF scheme and address at least one of its specific themes, addressing either a single theme within the current call or spanning several themes. Project teams must contain strong clinical representation and will preferably be clinically led. Projects must advance to first testing in man within the duration of the HICF project and have the potential to benefit patients within the following 3-5 years having demonstrated efficacy and received regulatory approvals. Projects must have already demonstrated ‘proof-of-principle’ supported by experimental and, where feasible, in vivo data. Projects must include a plan to progress the technology or intervention to the stage at which it is sufficiently validated, de-risked or developed to be attractive to commercial organisations, not-for-profit organisations and/or healthcare providers. Proposals must include a commercial strategy that takes into account the regulatory pathway, IP management, commercial barriers, health economics and routes to market. The HICF will not fund:

• early stage/ basic research
• clinical trials
• health delivery research by the NHS
• delivery or provision of health services by or within the NHS
• projects that could secure funding from industry or venture capital
• drug development
• regenerative medicine or vaccine development programs

Forms and guidance notes can be found here on the Wellcome Trust website.