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. 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 (UTI). To maximise impact, the provider is expected to group diagnostics with similar clinical positioning or use cases together to make the most of synergies across the cohort (e.g. when establishing the existing care pathway of the indications). Where relevant, the provider is also expected to align with existing or ongoing initiatives. A key priority is to ensure that insights, and findings from the project are made publicly available through open-access tools, share reports etc. to ensure that it benefits the broader AMR innovation community to inform future policy, funding and procurement decisions. The support required is across three work packages: Kick-off webinar: Introduce PACE awardees (diagnostics projects) to early-stage health economic assessment including its purpose, relevance and application across the cohort. Baseline development and modelling tool: Deliver care-pathway analyses (BSI, RTI and UTI) and a re-usable (modelling with guidance -enabling scenario testing using default assumptions. Project-specific deployment: Collaborate with each PACE project to input diagnostic specific data, generate tailored analyses, and refine the tool using real-world examples.