The Health Innovation Accelerator has been established to rapidly improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease across the 2.8m Greater Manchester population.

The Accelerator encompasses two projects, the Advanced Diagnostics Accelerator and the DEVOTE programme, delivered through a partnership between Health Innovation Manchester, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), The University of Manchester, and industry partners.

Through these programmes of work, the Accelerator is addressing several of Greater Manchester’s major morbidities including liver, heart and lung disease, by using academic, clinical and industry excellence to better understand data, digital tools and innovative point of care testing to improve health outcomes for patients. This partnership working has also been used to bring together expertise to deliver enhanced genomic diagnostics that are helping to optimise precision medicine for citizens across the region.

One of the key themes across both the Advanced Diagnostics Accelerator and the DEVOTE programme is to help to reduce health inequalities and to forge new relationships with communities in Greater Manchester. To date, the Health Innovation Accelerator has identified several underserved communities and are engaging with these groups to understand the barriers to NHS screening and how these can be addressed, leading to better health outcomes for those in the poorest health across the region.

Ben Bridgewater, Chief Executive at Health Innovation Manchester, said: “We’re really excited to be involved in this programme… Our role in this is to conduct the orchestra. We’ve got really good strengths in different bits of the city-region, and what we’re trying to do is to bring those things together to a common aim and provide really effective programme management into that – to deliver those benefits to local people and all the partners involved in the programme.”

Laura Rooney, Director of Strategy at Health Innovation Manchester, said: “The mission of the Health Innovation Accelerator is to improve people’s lives by having faster access to new diagnostics tools, new therapies and new medications, as well as working with industry to create new jobs and new opportunities to ultimately grow the economy. So, we’re improving health outcomes, we’re making the health and care system better and supporting economic growth and development in the Greater Manchester city-region.”

The programme is built on Greater Manchester’s existing research excellence and clinical strengths at both The University of Manchester and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), alongside the life-sciences cluster and digital capabilities from across the city-region – all underpinned by Health Innovation Manchester. This is split into four key priority areas (click each tab below to read more):

Professor Jane Eddleston, Strategic Clinical Advisor to Group CEO at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Delivering earlier and more accurate detection, diagnosis, and prognosis, through collaboration, is key to tackling the health inequalities across Greater Manchester. Through our clinical research excellence and joint working with our city-region health innovation accelerator colleagues and strategic global corporate partners we will be able to identify the most prevalent issues affecting our communities and develop targeted patient-centred care and treatment.”

Dean Cook, Executive Director of Place at Innovate UK, said: “The Health Innovation Accelerator is a perfect example of how the Innovation Accelerator Programme is driving local business growth and addressing regional inequalities but at the same time tacking some of our bigger societal needs. This Accelerator is driving and developing innovative processes and services which will enable our health sector to remain at the top of its game. The innovation it is supporting will improve the health outcomes for patients and reduce health inequalities across communities in Greater Manchester.”

Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement is a key component of the Accelerator, with the overall aim of empowering the public to engage in focus group discussions, co-creation sessions, creative campaign design, peer led interviews and ethnographic insight. This engagement is giving these communities a voice and a chance to express their lived experience, allowing the programme and our local health and care system to better understand how we can increase the access and uptake of advanced and community-based diagnostics amongst underserved groups moving forward.

Nicky Timmis, Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement Manager at Health Innovation Manchester said: “The Innovation Accelerator is all about tackling health inequalities and levelling up but, we can’t deliver this in isolation from the people, patient groups and communities most affected. So, public involvement and engagement is a cross-cutting theme, the golden thread throughout this programme and this will provide some of the insights and learnings that can help us links all of the projects together.”

The Health Innovation Accelerator

The Health Innovation Accelerator encompasses two projects, the Advanced Diagnostics Accelerator and the DEVOTE programme, delivered through a partnership between Health Innovation Manchester, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), The University of Manchester, and industry partners.

This project is part-funded by the Greater Manchester Innovation Accelerator programme. Led by Innovate UK on behalf of UK Research and Innovation, the pilot Innovation Accelerators programme is investing £100m in 26 transformative R&D projects to accelerate the growth of three high-potential innovation clusters – Glasgow City Region, Greater Manchester and West Midlands. Supporting the Government’s levelling-up agenda, this is a new model of R&D decision making that empowers local leaders to harness innovation in support of regional economic growth and help attract private R&D investment and develop future technologies.