Eleven projects have been approved funding of up to €40m in the first tranche of awards under the fourth round of the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund.

The DTIF is a €500m fund established under the National Development Plan in 2018.

The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment manages the DTIF with administrative support from Enterprise Ireland.

The purpose of the fund is to drive collaboration between Ireland’s research base and industry as well as facilitating enterprises to compete directly for funding in support of the development and adoption of these technologies.

Call 4 applications to DTIF were assessed against four criteria – quality of the disruptive technology, excellence of overall approach, economic impact & sustainability, and strength of the collaboration.

In Association with

To date, no assessment has been published of the outcomes of projects funded by previous DTIF calls.

The 11 successful consortia in this call have 40 partners, of which 23 are SMEs and 10 of which are leading their projects. To date, 153 SMEs have been awarded funding in the four calls to date.

The lastest funding awards bring the total allocation of DTIF funding to €275m.

Awardees include a consortium led by Poolbeg Pharma, which has been awarded €2.3m in non-dilutive grant funding to progress its Oral Vaccine Platform.

Taking place over three years, the collaboration between Poolbeg Pharma, UC, TCDm and AnaBio Technologies will result in the development of an oral vaccine candidate to a Phase I ready state.

Poolbeg Pharma said the resulting technology could serve as a platform for additional oral vaccine candidates for a wide range of pathogens, initially targeting bacterial infections.

Polobeg Pharma CEO Jeremy Skillington commented: “Poolbeg continues to target non-dilutive funding opportunities and we are delighted that this DTIF award is our first success."

DTIF CALL 4 AWARDS