Coordinated Call: MRC purchase mid-range equipment for biomedical research – EoI stage (Internal deadline: 28 April 2022)

The MRC has announced a new call providing funding for mid-range equipment for research across MRC’s scientific areas.

Applications are invited for mid-range equipment costing over £100,000 including VAT, and an MRC contribution of up to 100% of the total cost can be requested. The maximum MRC contribution for an item of equipment will be £800,000 (the total item cost may be higher, but the remainder must be met by institution or partner contributions). Applications must consist of a single piece of capital equipment, although this can include equipment that requires assembly or involves several components (not necessarily physically linked) provided they constitute a single technology platform.

Relevance to the priority areas in MRC’s delivery plan (PDF, 5.6MB) is particularly encouraged. Applications may be for new capability or replacement equipment for existing capability. In the case of the latter, applications are encouraged to outline any additional new capacity or capability provided by the replacement.

Requests for contributions to the following are outside the scope of this funding opportunity:

• very large facilities
• the purchase of equipment that constitutes normal elements of a well-founded laboratory, including:
  • centrifuges
  • fridges and other sample storage
  • incubators
• buildings and other types of infrastructures
• establishment of generic departmental computing platforms (for example, high performance computing clusters) for data analysis or data storage.

Please see the call website for more information.

University Internal Coordination:

There is no limit to the number of expressions of interest a research organisation can submit. However, the MRC may impose a limit on the number that an organisation can advance to the full application stage if demand is high, and they encourage organisations to discuss and prioritise their submissions as soon as possible. Therefore, this call will be managed according to the University’s restricted calls policy.

We will run a light-touch coordination for this call, and are only asking for University applicants to register their EoIs with us, to ease internal selection should the funder require it for the full application stage.

To register your EoI with us, please complete our online submission form by 28 April 2022. If asked to log-in, please use your Raven details. Please have the following information prepared for submission via the online form:

• Your name, dept and email
• The proposed equipment and expected cost (including VAT)
• If possible, a copy/screenshot of the SurveyMonkey response you are providing to the MRC. Otherwise, a brief project summary describing the equipment requested (max 150 words) and the research that will be carried out using the proposed equipment (max 150 words)

Please note that the above form is just for internal purposes, and does not serve as your submission to the MRC, which you will need to complete separately.

Funder deadline: 4pm, 28 April 2022

If you have any queries please don’t hesitate to contact us at researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk.

Thank you and best wishes,

Sarah Lamont, on behalf of researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk

Posted on 01/04/2022