How Atlantis Innovation Helped Secure €3.9 Million in Global Health EDCTP3 Funding for UTI-Diag
From first concept to funded consortium: a worked example of our proposal development and funding support service.
At a glance
The challenge
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the defining public health threats of this century. In 2019 it was associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths worldwide, and the highest death rates were recorded in western sub-Saharan Africa. Urinary tract infections (UTIs) sit at the heart of the problem: they are among the most common bacterial infections globally, and in many low-resource settings they are diagnosed on clinical signs alone. That approach is wrong roughly a third of the time, which drives both treatment failure and the unnecessary antibiotic use that fuels resistance.
The Global Health EDCTP3 call "Advancing point-of-care diagnostics to the market" asked for exactly the kind of project that is hard to write well: a two-stage submission combining clinical validation in African settings, product development towards regulatory approval, digital health integration, market access planning, WHO Target Product Profile alignment, environmental considerations and links to infectious disease surveillance, all within a single coherent work plan and a credible budget.
Our client group brought outstanding science and a strong set of technologies. What they needed was a partner who could turn that into a proposal that evaluators would score at the top of the ranking.
The solution: a two-tier diagnostic pathway
UTI-Diag connects primary and secondary care in Senegal and Cameroon:
From first screening to health-system intelligence
- Self-sampling biofluid cards for urine and finger-prick blood allow samples to be dried, posted and analysed without a cold chain, in a paper-based format with as little as 20 percent plastic content.
- Clinical validation in a prospective study of around 1,000 patients across the two countries, followed by product development, regulatory gap analysis, manufacturing transfer and a Global Access Plan for market entry in sub-Saharan Africa.
What we did
1. Concept development
Every strong proposal starts long before the first section is written. We worked with the scientific leads to sharpen the project concept around the specific expectations of the call, mapping each of the nine call objectives to a project-specific objective with measurable KPIs. That mapping became the backbone of the Excellence section and made it straightforward for evaluators to confirm that nothing in the call had been left unaddressed.
We also structured the narrative around four clearly named challenges (sampling, diagnostic tools, the gap from laboratory demonstrator to product, and adoption at health-system level) and showed how each one is answered by a dedicated pillar and work package. This "challenge, pillar, work package" architecture runs through the whole document and gives the proposal a logic that is easy to follow and easy to score.
2. Consortium building
The call demanded a partnership that could carry technologies from TRL 6 or 7 to TRL 8, run a clinical study in Africa and plan for commercialisation. We supported the coordinator in assembling a consortium that covers the entire value chain: academic and clinical partners (Karolinska Institutet, Institut Pasteur de Dakar, Centre Pasteur du Cameroun, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, a UK university partner and the Pasteur Network), European diagnostics companies (Mologic/GADx, Capitainer, Aidian) and African SMEs for implementation and digital health (MAA and Aviro Med Design).
Consortium building is not just about finding logos. We paid particular attention to balance: EU and African partners, research and industry, one large company alongside SMEs, and clear ownership of background IP so that exploitation is credible. The proposal's interdisciplinary section shows how each partner group brings engineering, assay development, clinical, health economic, regulatory and human-centred design expertise, with named roles for every partner in every objective.
3. Proposal writing
We took the lead on drafting and editing the full proposal across all three evaluation criteria:
- Excellence: a quantified background on the AMR and UTI burden, objectives with KPIs, a detailed state-of-the-art comparison against named competing products, a patent and freedom-to-operate check, TRL justification for each component, and methodology across six pillars including SSH, gender, open science and data management.
- Impact: pathways to impact linked to each expected outcome of the call, a scale and significance analysis, barriers and mitigation measures, stakeholder-specific dissemination, brief business plans for each commercial partner, a table of exploitable results and a KPI table for dissemination, communication and exploitation covering both the project lifetime and the three years after it.
- Implementation: nine work packages, a PERT diagram, a Gantt chart with named task leaders, and detailed work package descriptions with objectives and task-level allocation of responsibilities.
Our writing approach is to make the evaluator's job easy: every claim is quantified where possible, every objective is traceable to a task and deliverable, and the ground-breaking elements are summarised in one place so that they cannot be missed.
4. Review and full submission
Before submission we ran the proposal through a structured internal review, reading it as an evaluator would and scoring it against the Horizon Europe and EDCTP3 criteria. Our director's experience as an expert evaluator for the European Commission is central to this step: we know which weaknesses are most frequently penalised, and we fix them before they reach the panel. We then managed the completion of the administrative forms and the full submission on the Funding and Tenders portal, taking that burden away from the scientific team.
The result
Over the next three and a half years the consortium aims to recruit around 1,000 patients, validate both diagnostic tiers against culture-based reference methods, bring every core technology to TRL 8, and lay the groundwork for regulatory approval and market entry in at least three sub-Saharan African countries.
Why this matters for your organisation
UTI-Diag is a good illustration of the projects we are best placed to support: multi-partner, multi-country, technology-led and impact-driven, with a call text that is demanding and a competition that is fierce. Our involvement spanned the full lifecycle, from shaping the idea to pressing submit.
If you are preparing a Horizon Europe, EDCTP3, EIC, Innovate UK or UKRI application, we can help with:
- Concept development: aligning your idea with the call, defining objectives and KPIs and building the narrative architecture.
- Consortium building: identifying and approaching the right partners, balancing the partnership and defining roles.
- Proposal writing: drafting and editing the full Excellence, Impact and Implementation sections, tables, Gantt charts and budgets.
- Proposal review: evaluator-style scoring and detailed feedback on a draft you have written yourself.
- Full submission: managing the administrative forms, annexes and portal submission.
And, as we say to every client, if a project is not competitive we will tell you before you spend money on it.
Project information from the Global Health EDCTP3 project page. UTI-Diag is funded by the European Union under the Global Health EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking.