Other universities research funding awards
Alongside our major institutional partnerships, we also funded a small number of projects at other universities where specific research proposals aligned closely with our interests. In total, across these institutions, we awarded £44,774 through three grants. While limited in scale, these awards contributed additional breadth to the programme and supported discrete pieces of work in areas of clear relevance.
University of Southampton
At the University of Southampton, we funded a single research project focused on cancer treatment, providing continued support for early‑stage discovery work. This award sat within the treatment development strand of the programme and reflected our interest in supporting exploratory cancer research, even where outcomes were uncertain and timelines were long. The funding contributed to sustaining research activity during a critical phase and supported work that was intended to deepen understanding rather than deliver immediate clinical advances.
Although this was a one‑off award rather than part of a longer programme of support, it aligned with our broader willingness to back early‑stage cancer research where researchers were addressing difficult, high‑risk questions.
University College London
Our funding at University College London (UCL) supported a disease modelling research project on lung cancer brain metastases. This work focused on foundational scientific understanding rather than treatment or diagnostic development and sat firmly in the discovery phase. As with much of our disease modelling portfolio, we accepted that the most likely outputs would be academic in nature, contributing knowledge, methods and expertise that might enable future translational work.
The UCL award reflected our openness to supporting high‑quality research wherever it arose, even where we did not have a broader institutional relationship. It also reinforced our view that understanding disease mechanisms is a necessary underpinning for later progress across prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
University of Coventry
We funded an early‑stage treatment development project that explored the use of
high‑intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to trigger the targeted release of chemotherapy drugs at tumour sites. The research investigated whether polymer microcapsules, engineered to carry drugs targeting the cancer, could be ruptured on demand using ultrasound, allowing drugs to be released close to cancer growth while minimising wider side effects.
The work focused on designing and testing ultrasound‑responsive capsules containing metal nanoparticles, including gold and iron oxide, and evaluating how different ultrasound frequencies and intensities affected capsule rupture and release. Laboratory and preliminary clinical‑scale experiments demonstrated that capsule composition and ultrasound settings could be tuned to control release behaviour.
While the project remained firmly at proof‑of‑concept stage, it provided valuable technical insight into non‑invasive, targeted drug delivery and exemplified our support for high‑risk, interdisciplinary cancer research at an early and exploratory phase.
