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Seed funding

Call now closed.

Strategic aims of the Precision AMR

  • To break down existing barriers in AMR research
  • Developing new diagnostics
  • Improving quality and speed of results to wards
  • Changing clinical management to reduce AMR
  • Changing behaviours e.g. in prescribing medication for AMR infections
  • Data science to support AMR research
  • Understanding factors that lead to AMR e.g. audit and service evaluation

Precision AMR has funding available for 20 seed research projects, each with up to £16,000 to spend.

Eligibility

Lead applicant must hold a substantive contract with either UCL, UCLH and GOSH. Co-applicants may be other researchers, students, or external collaborators e.g. with other academic institutes/ industry/ research charities and research councils.

Each project proposal is strongly encouraged to use one (or more) of the facilities, where possible.

Can support

Each award will be primarily for consumables and additional facility costs (outside of the support Precision AMR already provides each facility), and can include salary costs. Any other costs will need to be discussed with the project manager in advance of submission for consideration.

Projects in microbiology, bacteriology, fungal and behavioural work as well as data science (data linkage, artificial intelligence and machine learning) work will be prioritised.

Cannot support

These awards will not be able to support animal work, proposals will animal work will need to clearly indicate how this is/ will be funded. Virology project proposals will not be considered as it is outside the scope of the funding to Precision AMR.

Details of the call, eligibility and funding criteria can be found on the below guidance form.  

Projects in HIV and tuberculosis in novel interventions to prevent and treat healthcare-associated infections and infectious disease cannot be supported: approaches to prevent and manage infections other than by antimicrobials, for example, through manipulating the microbiome; immunotherapies; phage therapy; vaccines also cannot be supported.

Application details

If you have any questions or queries, please contact us on: precision.amr@ucl.ac.uk

Call opens: Monday 3 August 

Deadline for application: Midnight, Sunday 11 October 

Applicants notified by: Early November

Funding available from 1 December 2020 - 31 August 2021 (9 months).

Documents

Award holder

Successful project which were awarded funding are listed below

Lead ApplicantProject title 
John ReadmanDevelopment of antisense/antigene agents based on synthetic oligonucleotides to inhibit carbapenemases and restore antibiotic sensitivity in resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae
Özge YetişGenomic characterisation of P. aeruginosa strains found in hospital shower water and inpatient bacteraemia isolates
Jeremy BrownNovel Polymyxin / Fusidic Acid Combination Therapies for the Treatment of Multi-drug Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacterales Infections
Peter Dutey-MagniReducing exposure to unnecessary antibiotics in the emergency department through early and reliable prediction of bacteriuria using a comprehensively validated machine learning model
Stephen Morris-JonesThe Hollow-Fibre Model of Mycobacterium abscessus Disease to test new antibiotics and combination therapy
Joseph StandingCefepime-sulbactam as a promising combination for empirical treatment in high ESBL settings: a dose ranging hollow fibre infection model study 
Akuzike Kalizang’omaA genomic approach to predict beta-lactam susceptibility among S. mitis using strains isolated from infective endocarditis patients over 18 years in the United Kingdom
Vicky Ennelementation of a rapid clinical metagenomics pipeline for the diagnosis of lower respiratory tract infections in critically ill patients at UCLH: a pilot study 
Francis YongblahNon-tuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) in domestic and healthcare water supplies – a potential route of transmission to Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and other at-risk patient groups?
Nidhi KapilGold Nanoparticles Decorated on Stimuli-Responsive Polymer Brushes as Stable Anti-microbial Surfaces
Nishkantha ArulkumaranNovel DNA nanomaterials to capture bacteria
Jennifer RohnCharacterisation of the gut and urinary microbiome for predicting treatment-resistant urinary tract infection and its downstream complications in renal transplant recipients
Victoria HeathTransforming the diagnostic pathway for high risk clinical pathogens
Dimitrios EvangelopoulosInvestigation of drug synergy and rational design of drug combinations to overcome multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli infections
Sarah Logan An observational study of culture negative urine in patients with lower urinary tract symptoms using metagenomic next generation sequencing
Bruce MacraeDevelopment of a WGS laboratory diagnostic pathway for the identification of M. genitalium and subsequent detection of relevant resistance targets
Jane CurrieUnderstanding asymptomatic bacteriuria in early pregnancy – an observational cohort study of maternal and neonatal outcomes
Vanya GantDeveloping a diagnostic WGS pathway for the characterisation of Aspergillus sp isolated from patients at risk of Invasive fungal infection: with focus on cyp51A gene profiling for the detection of azole resistance
Mona Bajaj-ElliottHow do we mitigate the rise of ‘superbugs’ in a paediatric transplantation setting?
Joseph StandingEstablishing the hollow fibre model of invasive candidiasis to investigate the impact of combination antifungal therapies on antifungal resistance
Stephen Morris-JonesDeveloping a diagnostic WGS pathway for the investigation of duodenal and gastric biopsies for the presence of H. pylori antibiotic resistance markers
Nishkantha ArulkumaranAntibiotic – induced immunosuppression
Frank KloproggeLeveraging the hollow fibre infection model to reduce and replace animal experiments in antimicrobial drug development
Vanya GantDeveloping a diagnostic WGS pathway for the characterisation of multi-drug resistant bacteria in outbreak situations
Shanom AliImproving detection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in hospital shower waters to characterise biofilm-communities using Whole Genome Sequencing to facilitate mapping of horizontal-transmission and persistence in the environment