Experimental Medicine Invited Stage Two Application: MRC Guide to the Current Funding Round

Experimental Medicine Invited Stage Two Application: MRC Guide to the Current Funding Round

The Medical Research Council (MRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), is accepting invited stage-two applications for its experimental medicine funding opportunity. The current opportunity is open. UKRI says it opened on 30 April 2026 and must receive applications by 2 September 2026 at 4:00pm UK time.

This is not an open call for a new idea at stage two. Only a team that submitted an experimental medicine stage-one application and received an invitation after successful assessment can apply. The invitation is the gateway: the application link is provided by email, and an uninvited proposal cannot use this route.

The scheme supports academically led projects in humans that address a clear gap in understanding human pathophysiology and have a credible path towards clinical impact. The central test is mechanistic. A proposal should use an experimental intervention or challenge with an established safety profile to test a focused hypothesis about how disease works, how a biological pathway can be modified, or why a treatment or other intervention produces a particular response.

Current opportunity at a glance

The date in the table is the live deadline for this round. The official page describes the opportunity as ongoing in the sense that MRC continues to use this funding route; that does not make the current submission window continuous or remove the stated closing time. Applicants must meet the current deadline and any earlier internal deadline set by their research organisation.

What MRC wants to fund

An eligible project must focus on a mechanistic hypothesis and include an experimental intervention or challenge in humans. The intervention can be pharmacological, immunological, physiological, psychological, or infectious, provided the proposed human work is appropriately justified and has an established safety profile. The project should explain why this experimental system is suitable for testing the hypothesis rather than merely collecting another set of observations.

The opportunity is broad across disease areas and interventions. A strong application might use a drug with an established safety profile as a tool to probe a disease pathway, introduce a controlled physiological or psychological challenge, or use a new readout or technology to understand human pathophysiology. Early efficacy signals may appear as secondary measures, but the scientific centre of gravity must remain the mechanism. The proposal should make the chain from intervention to biological response to clinically meaningful insight easy to follow.

MRC also allows tightly connected supporting work. Characterisation or phenotyping using samples from clinical studies may be included when it is clearly linked to a current treatment strategy, but it cannot be the sole focus. A limited, hypothesis-driven retrospective sample analysis may help refine the design of the interventional study, provided the milestones explain what the confirmatory analysis must show before the project progresses. A prospective nested study in a larger cohort trial may be eligible when it adds clear value, explores disease mechanisms, tests a novel hypothesis, and answers a different question from the main study.

The scope is deliberately different from a conventional efficacy trial. The page excludes efficacy-focused treatment trials, late-phase clinical efficacy trials, observational studies without an experimental challenge, biomarker discovery as a standalone activity, animal intervention or challenge work, and preclinical model development or validation. Development and evaluation of a novel therapeutic, diagnostic, or device belong in the relevant UKRI Translation: MRC proof-of-concept route instead. High-throughput screening for target validation is also outside this opportunity.

That boundary matters when shaping a stage-two proposal. Do not describe a mechanistic study as a large clinical effectiveness trial with a few laboratory measurements attached. Define the causal or pathway question first, then show why the intervention, participant population, sampling schedule, and readouts can answer it. If the proposal crosses into another MRC or research-council remit, the official guidance encourages applicants to contact MRC before applying.

Funding, duration, and permitted costs

There is no stated maximum award and no fixed maximum project duration. The official page says applicants typically apply for £1 million or more, but that is a description of common requests rather than a guaranteed award size or a target that every applicant must reach. Every cost still needs to be necessary, proportionate, and connected to the workplan. The application should justify the requested resources in the context of the proposed project.

MRC funds 80% of the project’s full economic cost and 100% of permitted exceptions. Eligible budget categories can include a contribution to the project lead’s salary, co-lead salaries, research and technical staff, consumables, equipment, travel, data preservation and sharing, dissemination, estates and indirect costs, NHS research costs, and public partnerships or related activities. International project co-leads at international organisations can request 100% of eligible costs, subject to the limits and guidance on international costs. Costs requested for international applicants from high-income countries, India, and China must not exceed 30% of total resources requested; the official page states there is no cap for applicants from development assistance countries on the DAC list.

New investigators have an additional salary rule. They are normally expected to request support for up to 50% of contracted working time, because the award is intended to sit alongside other research, clinical, teaching, or organisational duties during a transition to independence. A request above 50% needs a strong scientific justification. Their salary request should match the host organisation’s normal new-investigator levels, and the requested proportion is funded at 80% of full economic cost.

Some costs are expressly excluded. MRC will not fund PhD studentships, publication costs, grant-bridging costs, or efficacy-focused treatment trials through this opportunity. A project partner may contribute cash or in-kind support such as staff time, equipment, facilities, data, software, materials, participant recruitment, or human samples. Host institutions do not have to provide matched funding beyond the standard 20% of full economic cost, although they must provide the research environment and infrastructure needed for award-specific activity.

The duration is determined by the science. Applicants should justify the time needed for regulatory work, team recruitment, participant recruitment, intervention delivery, follow-up, analysis, and the milestones that determine whether the project proceeds. The guidance says experimental medicine awards will typically have two milestones with defined success criteria. Milestones should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely, with robust go or no-go criteria where appropriate. Put the critical mechanistic questions as early as the study design allows.

Who can apply

The project lead must be based at an eligible research organisation and must direct the project and be actively engaged in the work. The team must have submitted an experimental medicine stage-one application and, after successful assessment, been invited to submit the stage-two application. Additional team members who were not in the stage-one team can be added when they provide a justified contribution.

If the project lead does not have an employment contract covering the proposed project, the research organisation must confirm that a successful award would be supported through the end of the project and that the necessary support, including mentorship and career development for early career researchers, will be provided. The lead organisation is responsible for submission to UKRI. NHS organisations should check early that they are available in the Funding Service because setup may require additional steps.

MRC welcomes eligible new investigators. A new investigator should be ready to move towards independence, have support from the research organisation, demonstrate skills and experience matching the transition-to-independence stage, and show that they are the sole intellectual leader of the application and proposed work. The route can be available to postdoctoral research assistants, lecturers, junior fellows, other research staff, people with or without a contract at the chosen host, and clinically active or non-clinical researchers, subject to the full criteria.

The new-investigator route is not for someone who has already achieved independence. In particular, MRC says an applicant is not eligible if they have previously led a research team or received a substantial grant as fellow or project lead. The official definition of a substantial grant is typically one lasting three or more years and including salary support for at least one additional team member. Other exclusions include having held a transition-to-independence award, applying for an MRC new investigator award twice before, or having a UKRI fellowship application under consideration. A new investigator can include co-leads, specialists, and other roles when they bring essential complementary expertise, but the application must make the applicant’s leadership unmistakable.

International researchers can apply as project co-leads when they make a major intellectual contribution to the design or conduct of the project. Other international collaborators, and UK partners not based at approved organisations, should be included as project partners. Their role, added value, and costs should be explained in the appropriate application sections.

What to prepare for stage two

The stage-two proposal needs to show how it responds to the earlier stage. The related-applications response asks how the application differs from the stage-one submission and how the team considered and acted on the panel’s comments. Do not simply paste the earlier outline into a longer form. Create a clear record of what changed in the hypothesis, intervention, design, analysis, risk controls, recruitment plan, or resources, and explain why each change improves the proposal.

The Funding Service application covers the project vision, the intervention, the team’s capability to deliver, ethical and responsible research and innovation, resources, and, where relevant, career development and research-organisation support for a new investigator. The workplan should cover methodology and experimental design, reproducibility and statistical design, project milestones, risk management, research environment and infrastructure, patient and public involvement, communication and engagement, and data management and sharing.

For an intervention in humans, the case for safety and governance should be concrete. Explain the established safety profile of the intervention or challenge, participant selection, exclusion criteria, monitoring, stopping rules, adverse-event handling, oversight, and the route to the required approvals. Tie these controls to the actual protocol. A generic sentence about ethics is not enough for a study that deliberately perturbs people.

The resource case should connect each major cost to a study activity. Show how staff time supports recruitment, intervention delivery, sample handling, data management, statistics, and follow-up. Explain equipment and facility charges, specialist assays, public-partnership payments, and dissemination costs. If the project uses NHS resources in the UK and requires Health Research Authority approval or NIHR Research Delivery Network support, the official guidance requires a SoECAT. Contact an AcoRD specialist early, complete and authorise the online SoECAT, then extract the study-information and summary pages from the Funder Export as one PDF for upload. An application that needs this document but omits the required pages may be rejected.

Letters or emails of support should come from identified project partners and should confirm the partner’s specific contribution. The guidance does not want general letters from people who are not project partners; those will be ignored in assessment. Use the application sections to explain the team, host environment, facilities, clinical access, public involvement, and collaboration rather than filling the submission with non-specific endorsements.

How to apply in the UKRI Funding Service

The current route is the UKRI Funding Service. Je-S cannot be used for this opportunity. The project lead completes the application, with contributions from team members and partners, but only the lead research organisation can submit it.

1. Confirm that you are the invited project lead and use the application link supplied by MRC by email.
2. Sign in to the Funding Service or create an account. Account setup requires selecting the organisation, verifying the email address, and setting a password.
3. Complete the questions in the Funding Service text boxes. Answers can be saved and completed later; follow the service instructions for any document uploads. Review the listed questions and assessment criteria while drafting.
4. Check the completed application in read-only view before sending it to the research office. Build in time to catch missing sections, inconsistent figures, and incomplete team details.
5. Send the application to the research office for checking. The office can return it for edits.
6. The research office submits the checked application to UKRI. The submission must arrive by 2 September 2026 at 4:00pm UK time; the service will not accept an application after the deadline.

The application cannot be changed after submission, and UKRI will not return it for amendment. Follow the organisation’s internal timetable as well as the published deadline. For a technical issue with the Funding Service, use support@funding-service.ukri.org. For questions about this specific opportunity, contact experimental.medicine@mrc.ukri.org. For costings and proposal preparation, MRC directs applicants to their research office first.

Assessment and final checks

MRC assesses applications through independent expert review, an applicant response, and an interview. Applicants cannot nominate reviewers in the new Funding Service. After expert review, the team has 14 calendar days to respond to reviewer comments; a named project co-lead can enter the response through the research office if the project lead cannot do so.

An expert panel then interviews the project lead and up to two co-leads, scores and prioritises the applications, and passes the process to panel chairs and MRC executives for the funding decision. The current UKRI page expects interviews to be held on 2 to 3 December 2026. Before submission, check that the application makes the mechanistic question, human intervention, safety case, stage-one response, recruitment plan, statistical design, milestones, resource request, and path to clinical impact consistent across every section.

The opportunity is currently open and should be treated as a live application route, not an archive entry. The metadata deadline is therefore the verified current closing date, and historicalReference is set to false. Applicants who were not invited after stage one should not attempt to use this page as a substitute for the stage-one route.