MRC Impact Acceleration Award

The MRC Impact Acceleration Award is a competitively awarded grant to support a single, high-risk development step for a new or repurposed medicine, medical device, diagnostic, or other medical product. Projects should generate critical preliminary data to de-risk onward progression to larger translational funding such as MRC Proof of Concept. Applicants must be based at an MRC-eligible research organisation and the award bridges smaller Impact Acceleration Account funding and larger proof-of-concept schemes.

Funding to undertake a focused single-step development project to generate key data that de-risks further development and enables progression to larger proof-of-concept funding schemes.

Applicants must direct the project and be actively engaged in the work and be based at an MRC-eligible research organisation. Projects should have prior supporting data and aim to generate critical preliminary data; applicants without an employment contract for the project duration require the host research organisation to confirm contract extensions and necessary support. International researchers may participate as project co-leads but project leads must be based at eligible UK organisations.

Submit an application through the UKRI funding service; only one application per person as project lead is allowed and uninvited resubmissions after 2026-04-01 will be rejected. International collaborators should be included as project partners and project co-leads where applicable.