Wellcome: Unblocking barriers to progress in bioimaging (opening in Jan 2024)
About
Wellcome plans two bioimaging funding activities:
- Addressing the lack of opportunities to access imaging facilities and training for researchers based in low-resource settings.
They aim to increase access to bioimaging facilities and training in bioimaging methodologies for researchers in low- and middle-income countries.
This activity, launching in January 2024, will see a series of funding calls delivered via a partnership with Global Bioimaging (GBI), a global consortium of imaging infrastructures. Their established network and understanding of the global bioimaging landscape will maximise reach and impact. - Developing novel technologies and methodologies to unlock discovery research in particular areas of interest.
Wellcome will also focus on enabling the development of novel tools and technology for bioimaging. We will deliver a two-phase directed funding call, launching in January 2024, with the aim of bringing together technology developers and users in collaborative frameworks to tackle some of the biggest methodological barriers currently holding up discovery research.
The initial phase will identify novel teams with bold and ambitious technology development programmes. We will fund these for a short period (12-18 months) to allow them to collect proof-of-principle data and/or expand their collaborative team. Some of the most promising teams will then be scaled up to fully funded programmes.
Having already invested in technologies imaging at the scale of atoms-cells, we will now focus on cells-tissues. This is where some of the most ambitious biological questions remain unanswered – in the fields of connectomics, cell atlasing and more broadly in the visualisation of dynamic and systems biology, for example.
They will also be interested in novel methodologies aimed at analysing complex imaging datasets.