An Overview of the Healthcare Research and Development (R&D) Funding Landscape

Healthcare and biomedical research are a vital component of the UK science base, with a strong positive rate of return to the UK economy, with ways and means to allocate research funding considered one of the most influential elements in attempts to govern contemporary public science. The availability of research funding can embody signals about needs that governments, their agencies, industries and societies expect funded research to address. Regular analyses can therefore provide helpful evidence to support monitoring of emergent trends and strategic coordination.  This funding landscape scan analysed the titles and abstracts of awarded grants to classify records according to health category using UKCRC’s Health Research Classification System (HRCS) and mapped amount and date of funding to identify current R&D trends within the healthcare funding landscape.