Let’s beat it! £30 million research funding award launches for breakthrough in heart disease

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) has launched a unique research funding award, the Big Beat Challenge, aimed at bringing together world-leading researchers and innovators to identify and solve any of the biggest problems in heart and circulatory disease.

Worth £30 million, the award is one of the largest and most ambitious of its kind, pushing the international research community to identify a real-world challenge, significant unmet need or opportunity for game-changing innovation in heart and circulatory science or medicine.

Any proposals must be transformative, clinically relevant, and with a multi-disciplinary approach that couldn’t be done without funding on this scale. Ideas could transform the lives of a few, or provide a smaller but important change for many.

The challenge is open to teams from any country, sector or discipline, that are working on a scale above and beyond traditional research schemes to achieve a truly revolutionary breakthrough in any heart or circulatory disease.

An international, multi-disciplinary, expert advisory panel is being assembled by the BHF to oversee the Big Beat Challenge and a call for outline applications is set to open at the end of 2018 and close in mid-2019.

Shortlisted applications with the most promising ideas will be given seed funding, and teams will then have around six months to develop their final proposals. These full applications will then be peer-reviewed and the winning research programme recommended by the panel.

“We’ve made great progress over the last 60 years in understanding and tackling many heart and circulatory diseases, and I am proud that BHF-funded research has made a substantial contribution to this success,” stressed Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, medical director at the BHF. “But heart and circulatory diseases remain a major health problem worldwide, still causing one in three deaths globally.

“The time is right for a radical approach. With recent advances in areas all the way from genome editing to artificial intelligence, we have an unprecedented opportunity to exploit new ways of doing research that moves beyond incremental gains and accelerates breakthroughs.

“This will be one of the largest awards of its kind. It is without borders and without boundaries. The winning project will be truly transformative, and something that simply couldn’t happen without funding on this scale. The ideas can tackle any heart or circulatory condition using any approach. All we ask is that you think big.”