PACE - A health economic evaluation framework and bespoke analysis for AMR Diagnostic Technologies

PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy) is a £30 million initiative supporting and funding early-stage innovation in medicines and diagnostics, aimed at tackling AMR. It was established in September 2023 and is a collaboration between Innovate UK (IUK), LifeArc, and Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) – three leaders in the UK's health innovation and research community.

PACE brings together the funding, resources, and partnerships to help innovators progress their early-stage antimicrobial drug and diagnostics projects with greater speed, support and confidence – giving the best AMR innovations the greatest chance of success. PACE is in the process of onboarding a cohort of projects into its portfolio from its 2024 Diagnostics Funding Round and by November expects to have onboarded between 4-6 early stage (TRL2-5) projects seeking to advance AMR diagnostics that have potential to reduce unnecessary prescribing, provide faster results to indicate which antibiotic should be used and/or catalyse the move to personalised, narrow-spectrum treatments. Projects are developing diagnostic solutions for urinary tract, lower respiratory tract and blood stream (including sepsis) infections.

The PACE programme is looking for an external provider to deliver an ‘Enabling Project’ in partnership related to early health economic analysis to support our cohort of AMR diagnostic innovation developers from our 2nd PACE funding call. Please see (https://paceamr.org.uk/news/ukhsa-announced-as-first-pace-collaboration-to-help-tackle-deadly-antimicrobial-resistance/) for details of our first enabling project partnering with UKHSA to provide access to clinical isolates for our first cohort of therapeutics developers.

The overall purpose of this second enabling project is to provide PACE awardees and the wider AMR community with access to practical early-stage health economic outputs, including care pathway insights, indicative cost analyses, early-stage economic modelling and value proposition frameworks tailored to our cohorts emerging diagnostic technologies. These outputs will be designed to support product development decisions, stakeholder engagements and future reimbursement planning with relevance across bloodstream infections (BSI), respiratory tract infections (RTI) and urinary tract infections.