Mind to Market - Why and How Biomedical Charities Today Fund Medical Technologies for the Future

The technological power that drove the Human Genome Project revealed to the biomedical community the tremendous benefit of technology which took biological investigation to a completely new, massive and parallel scale. It also forged a convergence between genetics, robotics, engineering, sensing, mathematics and the computational sciences. The extent of this can be seen from the way molecular biologists have embraced the term "chip" and bioinformatics has become such a key discipline for large-scale projects. Today the convergence has evolved to a point where technology developers are interfacing with disease investigators to generate new medically useful products that will extend or improve quality of life. Biomedical charities such as the Wellcome Trust understand that the path from an idea to a finished product is extremely uncertain and requires many sets of skills and access to different types of funds. The Wellcome Trust, primarily through it\´s Translation Award Fund, will provide funding to institutions or companies for the support of product development at key stages of the life cycle. The aim is to ensure innovative medical technologies have a better chance of satisfying an unmet medical need.