UKDI Competition: Biosecurity Frontiers

Funding for novel innovations to strengthen the UK’s ability to detect, prevent and respond to biological risks.

UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) – formerly the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) – is part of the UK Government’s Ministry of Defence. UKDI helps public and private innovators develop their ideas into exploitable products and services for defence and security customers, and experiments with novel methodology and innovative approaches to facilitate accelerating delivery of the best solutions.

The Cabinet Office is leading this UKDI Competition on behalf of the UK government to seek innovative proposals to assist in delivering the ambitions of the 2023 UK Biological Security Strategy and 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). This competition is funded by the Integrated Security Fund (ISF), which tackles the highest priority threats to UK national security, both at home and overseas.

The intention is to fund innovative solutions that have the capacity or potential to be used on the frontline of managing biosecurity risks. Through engaging with this competition, industry and academia will be able to demonstrate the feasibility or practicality of their solution, as well as meeting the minimum standard of compliance with domestic regulations.

Proposals must address at least one of the following three challenges:

• Challenge 1: Next Generation Biodetection & Biosurveillance – The government is seeking to bolster biosurveillance capabilities to detect and monitor traditional and novel threats that are naturally derived or manmade.
• Challenge 2: AI and Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Vaccines (DTVs) – The government is seeking industry support in harnessing AI to support the identification and development of new diagnostic, therapeutic and vaccine (DTV) candidates. This would likely focus on priority pathogens identified by the UK Health Security Agency and novel biological threats, and the use of predictive AI for structure-based diagnostics and DTV discovery and development.
• Challenge 3: Non-pharmaceutical Protective Systems – The government is looking to diversify and strengthen the supply chains of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Innovations must progress through at least one Technology Readiness Level (TRL) during the project, with a maximum project length of 12 months. Innovations must progress up to a minimum of TRL 4 and a maximum of TRL 6 for Challenge 1 and 3, and a maximum of TRL 7 for Challenge 2.