Glasgow City Region launches £25 million open call for ambitious local project proposals for transformative local innovations that will improve lives

• Glasgow City Region launches a £25 million Open Call for ambitious innovation projects based within the Health and Life Sciences sector.
• Applications are welcomed from across the sector and must meet defined eligibility criteria.
• This forms part of the UK wide £500 million UK Government Local Innovation Partnerships Fund for local innovation in science and technology, for which Glasgow City Region will benefit from £50 million funding over five years.

Glasgow City Region has launched a £25 million Open Call for ambitious project funding proposals that will drive local innovation and grow the economy, providing a vital boost to businesses within the Region’s Health and Life Sciences sector. 

The Open Call is targeted at projects which are delivering transformative research and development that will improve lives – accelerating the commercialisation of research or turning research into practical real-world use such as product development, prototyping, tech transfer and patents.

The focus on the Health and Life Sciences sector was underpinned by detailed analysis on the local innovation ecosystem by the Region’s Intelligence Hub to identify the sectors that offered the most potential to grow the economy, validated by industry experts.  

The local Health and Life Sciences sector now supports over 10,000 jobs and has seen a 47% increase in employment between 2019 and 2023.

It is recognised to have enormous future potential, with its MedTech, BioTech, and Pharma and Biopharma-sub sectors particularly strong, and Scottish Enterprise projecting a 300% growth potential in turnover in the cluster across Scotland by 2035. The Region already accounts for almost 60% of the total turnover across the country.

Susan Aitken, Chair of the Glasgow City Region Cabinet and Leader of Glasgow City Council said:

“Health and Life Sciences is an example of a dynamic sector where Glasgow is at the forefront – one ranked by DSIT as more innovative than comparators in London and the OxCam Cluster, and which is projected to grow by three hundred per cent across Scotland in the next decade.

“Benefitting from an ecosystem with unparalleled access to clinical expertise, the city has become a live testbed for new health technologies and treatments.

That combination of entrepreneurialism and cutting-edge research is exemplified by Glasgow University spinout Chemify. Having secured support from the Innovation Accelerator programme, Chemify now employs 165 staff.

That’s the type of success story we want even more of. And I’m delighted to announce our call for ambitious proposals that could benefit from a share of twenty-five million pounds now available through the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund.

Led by UK Research and Innovation and administered here in the City Region, funding will be awarded to health and life sciences projects moving research from the laboratory into real-world use”.

As digital enabling technologies is already highly integrated within the cluster and already providing the levers to support the Life Sciences sector in Glasgow, proposals from businesses with a further sector – Digital Enabling Technologies, where activity is driving digitally powered innovation and growth in Health and Life Sciences will also be considered. This is in recognition that breakthroughs in health, medicine and biotechnology are often accelerated by data science, AI and quantum computing.

Project proposals must meet eligibility criteria and come with private sector match funding of at least 2:1 from non-public sources. For every one pound of public spend, the projects must realise or enable £2 of private investment.

Applications can be made through the Glasgow City Region Open Call website and must be submitted by 20th February 2026, with a shortlisting process completed in March 2026.

An Online MS Teams event for bidders to ask questions will be held on Monday 15 December at 4pm. Contact glasgowcityregion@glasgow.gov.uk for details and a link.

The Open Call forms part of the wider UK Government Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF) that will invest up to £500 million into the development and scaling of high-potential innovation clusters across the UK. It is designed to support both established clusters with a proven track record of innovation, and emerging clusters that are in earlier stages of development but have significant potential to generate economic value.

Along with Manchester and West Midlands, Glasgow will benefit from a £50 million funding pot over five years.

Glasgow’s Local Innovation Partnership Fund will be made up of: 

• £25 million from the Open Call for commercialisation of Research and Development.
• An additional £20 million will be set aside for new lab space to support growth in the sector since research has identified a lack of lab space in the sector is a barrier to growth.

The supporting £20 million infrastructure fund will be launched next week (week commencing 15 December) and will be open for 14 weeks.

• £5 million for a complementary skills programme to be delivered via the Region’s colleges to provide career opportunities for residents across the whole Region and meet the demand for Life and Health Sciences professionals as the cluster grows.

The new funding follows on the back of and learning from the successful Innovation Accelerator pilot scheme for which Glasgow City Region benefitted from £43 million in UK Government funding to support local breakthrough technologies – from Extended Reality to advances in fintech, quantum computing and chemputation, along with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.