Greater Manchester Advanced Diagnostics Accelerator Health Innovation Manchester

The understanding of disease mechanisms is advancing rapidly, leading to innovations which enable earlier and more accurate detection, diagnosis, and prognostication, including ruling-out disease in those who can be safely reassured. This gives opportunities for better population health and targeted care pathways bespoke to individuals. However, there remains a critical gap between these discoveries being made in universities or business and implementation to local population benefit. This bottleneck is present in Greater Manchester despite the nationally/internationally significant size, reputation, and connectivity of our innovation ecosystem, holding back local population health and commercial opportunities for businesses. Whilst enhanced diagnostics is critical to delivering better health overall, it is specifically important in Greater Manchester. 

The challenge

Compared to national averages, residents in eight out of the ten local authorities in GM spend more of their life in poor health, and instances of smoking and obesity and associated health issues are more prevalent. Current tools and pathways are not sufficient in engaging our most at-risk communities (typically those from BAME and lower socioeconomic backgrounds) who are trapped in a cycle of deprivation, poor health and disengagement from public services. In addition to putting pressure on health services and the public purse, ill-health has a well-evidenced negative impact on city region productivity inhibiting levelling up. 

The project

An intervention is required to simultaneously tackle health and wealth through inclusive, innovation-led growth. The Advanced Diagnostics Accelerator will do this through a series of projects looking at Greater Manchester's major morbidities (liver, heart and lung disease including lung cancer) in which academic and industry excellence from our frontier sectors of advanced diagnostics and digital/data will be brought together to reimagine citizen pathways with NHS stakeholders and residents. It will bridge research and clinical implementation to catalyse and demonstrate the economic and social benefits of advanced diagnostics for individuals, industry and the wider economy. By doing so we will overcome inertia/friction to accelerate time to impact in this sector.

The future

Programme outputs are designed to open market opportunities for local businesses and support NHS cultural change from reactive acute care to proactive community prevention, resulting in better health outcomes and reduced demand for hospital services. This project will maximise the social, economic and fiscal potential of advanced diagnostics for citizens, specifically those most at need, industry and the NHS, and embed inclusive growth principles -- pivoting the city-region's academic, industry and innovation expertise to tackle a major local, national and global societal issue.