The R&D projects will be led by Affymetrix UK, Aridhia Informatics, IDBS, Life Technologies, Oxford Gene Technology and Source BioScience UK.
The funding will also help to improve cancer care by offering cancer specialists with information specific to their patient’s tumor, enabling more targeted treatment to be provided.
The investment is the third to be made through the Technology Strategy Board-managed Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform (SMIP), an initiative which will oversee an investment of over £60m of government funding over five years in innovative research and development.
The first investments, totalling £3.7m, were in the fields of inflammatory biomarkers for more effective drugs and business models & value systems.
The commercial solutions from these projects will support the aims of Cancer Research UK’s own Stratified Medicines Programme, which aims to test up to 9,000 tumour samples in order to demonstrate how molecular diagnosis of NHS patient’s tumours could be scaled up to provide a national service, whilst also consenting patients for permission to link their genetic and clinical data to inform research in the future.
Technology Strategy Board chief executive Iain Gray said these projects will lead to the development of products or services which can be readily adopted by NHS commissioners, for the improvement of patient outcomes.
The partners in the Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform are the Technology Strategy Board, the Department of Health (England), the Scottish Government Health Directorates, the Medical Research Council (MRC), the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), Cancer Research UK and Arthritis Research UK.