New £8m funding will soon be available for joint Swiss-UK clinical trials and to support early-career research capacity strengthening.
Applications for the bilateral clinical trial funding opportunity will open in April 2025.
International collaboration fuels innovation and helps advance clinical studies aiming to prevent, detect, or treat disease. Multi-country clinical trials enable recruitment of a wider and more diverse population, as well as mutual access to expertise and facilities. This boosts the effectiveness of the studies and the applicability of the research findings.
The UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) are partnering on a bilateral call for clinical trials in areas of unmet need.
Researchers are encouraged to begin building research groups as early as possible. To support these efforts, researchers can access support from SNSF Scientific Exchanges and the NIHR Research Support Service (RSS).
NIHR and SNSF will host a webinar on 9 January 2025 to provide researchers more detail about this bilateral funding opportunity.
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR, said: "International endeavours such as this partnership with the Swiss National Science Foundation foster innovative thinking and novel approaches to complex health and social care challenges. We see considerable benefit in encouraging an exchange of ideas that can further drive scientific advancements, support emerging researchers working collaboratively with colleagues, and enable a pooling of resources including expertise and equipment. This approach of bilateral collaboration accelerates research progress, with the aim of getting effective treatments to patients faster."
Professor Matthias Egger, President National Research Council, SNSF, said: "The UK is a main partner country for SNSF and we are delighted about this new collaboration with NIHR. The bilateral call will strengthen clinical research in Switzerland and offer new international collaboration opportunities for our researchers to address important medical needs."
International collaboration on clinical trials
Researchers from Switzerland and the UK can apply for the funding. This funding opportunity will support clinical studies that test the efficacy or clinical and cost effectiveness of interventions. Studies can focus on any intervention used to diagnose, prevent or treat disease. There must already be sufficient evidence from earlier clinical studies in humans that the proposed interventions might work. Expertise and trial recruitment must be spread across Switzerland and the UK. Applicants will be expected to describe how they will contribute to the building of research capacity and expertise of early and mid-career researchers, including the support package that will be made available to them.
The joint funding available for this call is 8.8 million CHF / £8 million GBP. SNSF and NIHR will fund up to 3 high-quality, collaborative Swiss-UK clinical studies. Funding is available for trials up to 5 years in length. SNSF and NIHR will conduct a joint evaluation and review process. Each will fund activities based in their country.
This collaboration will build and benefit from the work of the Access Consortium to align regulatory requirements for therapeutics, of which both the UK and Switzerland regulatory agencies are members.
Build research teams and prepare proposals now
The call will open in April 2025 and the call specification can be viewed here. Researchers can start building multidisciplinary research teams and prepare their proposals now. TheSNSF Scientific Exchanges funding scheme can assist in this process. Researchers from Switzerland can apply for smaller grants:
to invite their UK partner(s) to Switzerland
or visit their partner(s) in the UK
These grants can fund meetings or workshops of up to 5 days or research visits of several months.
UK researchers are able to access the NIHR RSS for free advice, support and expertise when developing their collaborative research applications. There is alsoa wide range of NIHR infrastructure support available. Researchers interested in this funding opportunity can register for the webinar on 9 January 2025.