Building a clear picture of UK health research funding

Building a clear picture of UK health research funding Across the UK, public bodies and medical research charities support a vast range of health research. The most recent UK Health Research Analysis gives a sense of the scale: it covered more than 23,500 awards from 173 funding organisations and over £5 billion in health research spending in 2022. For two decades, UK Health Research Analyses have shown the value of bringing this information together. However, the analyses have provided only periodic historical snapshots rather than a dynamic view of the changing funding landscape. A timely view is needed to answer questions such as: Who is funding what? Where is research taking place? How is investment changing over time? The Medical Research Council (MRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), is working with Europe PMC, hosted by EMBL-EBI, to develop the UK Health Research Funding Portfolio Database and Interactive Dashboard. The project is in response to Action 11.1 of the UK Government’s Life Sciences Sector Plan, which calls for closer coordination across health and life sciences funders. Planned for release in March 2027, the tool will use the established health and research activity classifications and a user-friendly dashboard to bring more of the breadth and diversity of this investment into a coherent, regularly updated view. The public-facing dashboard will make it easier to explore award data from participating UK funders. For example, a funder could compare the number and value of awards across years, examine investment by health category and research activity, and identify potential overlap or complementary activity. Researchers and institutions could see which funders and recipient organisations are active in related areas and where work is taking place. Industry and investors could use the same view to understand UK research strengths, see how investment is changing across locations and research areas, and identify potential partnership opportunities. Europe PMC has long supported open science by linking grants to publications and other research outputs, helping users understand the outputs and wider impact of investment, and by making grant data openly available through its Grant Finder and application programming interface (API). Furthermore, by integrating persistent identifiers Europe PMC is connecting variations in names and making grant searches more consistent. Although the data resulting from this project is UK-focused for now, the expanded data model remains applicable for Europe PMC’s international funder group. The longstanding infrastructure that supports Europe PMC funders in linking grants to research outputs will be rebuilt as a modern, scalable, open-source infrastructure. Future growth of the tool could incorporate further datasets and categorisation. The value of the dashboard will depend on the quality and coverage of the data contributed to it. The Europe PMC team welcomes interest from public bodies and medical research charities that fund health research and are interested in supporting this project and exploring the wider benefits of joining the Europe PMC funder group. Read a more detailed description of the project and find the contact details on the Europe PMC blog. Edit