UK Obesity Research Institute Full Application 2026: Up to £72 Million From MRC and the British Heart Foundation for One Seven-Year National Institute, Closing 19 November 2026

UK Obesity Research Institute Full Application 2026: Up to £72 Million From MRC and the British Heart Foundation for One Seven-Year National Institute, Closing 19 November 2026

On 30 July 2026 the Medical Research Council published the full application stage of the UK Obesity Research Institute funding opportunity. It is one of the largest single research awards currently open anywhere in the UK system: up to £72 million of MRC money over an initial seven years, supporting a full economic cost of up to £90 million, with the British Heart Foundation co-funding up to £12 million of that total for a cardiovascular component. MRC expects to make exactly one award.

That last detail shapes everything else about this opportunity. This is not a scheme with a success rate and a portfolio of grants. It is a competition to build and lead a national institute — UK-ORI — with a director, a leadership team, a single-site hub, and a set of partner research sites operating as one coordinated programme. Applications close at 4:00pm UK time on Thursday 19 November 2026, with interviews in February 2027 and a funding decision communicated in March 2027.

Key Details

Note the conditional attached by MRC itself: funding for this opportunity is subject to approval of a full business case. That does not change how you apply, but it is an honest signal that the final shape of the investment is not yet fully locked.

What the Award Actually Pays For

The eligible cost list is unusually broad, because MRC is funding an institute rather than a project. You can request a directly allocated contribution to the director’s salary for the portion of their time on UK-ORI, and directly allocated contributions to the salaries of the leadership team and other established researchers — typically 15% to 30% of their time, in line with their research contribution. Senior professional enabling roles are explicitly fundable, including a chief operating officer and a senior chief technology officer whose remit is to align the research with industry, investor, and stakeholder needs.

Directly incurred salaries cover a central administrative team supporting the director, plus research staff, technicians, and professional enabling staff where their critical role is clearly justified. There is a specific allowance for recruiting new researchers who are critical to the challenge — people switching disciplines or sectors, or moving from overseas — at up to 100% salary for up to three years while they establish other grant support.

On equipment, the rules are precise. Up to £500,000 of start-up costs for routine equipment (items over £25,000 that form normal elements of a well-founded laboratory) can be requested at 80% FEC, fully justified, and excluding generic departmental kit. Mid-range or large equipment critical to establishing platforms or facilities is funded at 100% — but only if it was requested and accepted at the outline stage. Anything else must go through MRC’s annual mid-range equipment route. For reference, MRC defines mid-range or large equipment as a single item over £138,000 (£115,000 excluding VAT).

Studentships are an exception funded at 100%, including iCASE studentships, and may typically be requested at up to two starting each year across the award — up to 14 in total, and never beyond the institute’s supervisory capacity. Non-clinical studentships are expected to run four years and must align with an existing Doctoral Training Partnership or Doctoral Landscape award at the host organisation. If you intend to include studentships, MRC asks you to contact [email protected] before submission for costing guidance.

Also fundable: research consumables, travel, data preservation and sharing, technology and data platforms, experimental medicine studies, innovative training and capacity building not available elsewhere, knowledge transfer and commercialisation, public partnership activities including payments to public contributors, environmental sustainability initiatives, estates and indirect costs, and a website.

International project co-leads can be funded at 100% of eligible costs where they make an important research contribution to a UK site. Costs for international applicants from high-income countries (those not on the OECD DAC list), India and China must not exceed 30% of total resources requested. There is no cap for DAC-list countries.

What Falls Outside Scope

MRC has drawn the boundary tightly, and misreading it is the fastest way to be rejected at the eligibility check roughly four weeks after the closing date.

Out of scope: the broad societal and environmental drivers of obesity; behavioural science alone without integration into basic biological mechanisms; basic, observational or nutrition science that does not yield mechanistic insight into pathophysiology or a pathway to prevention or treatment; longitudinal population studies and clinical trials beyond phase IIa; and proposals that are predominantly networking activity or a bundle of project-type grants with no clear integration or added value.

Separately, MRC will not fund open access costs (covered by the UKRI open access grant), training available through existing routes such as current DTPs or UKRI fellowships, duplicative equipment already in the applicants’ environment, generic computing platforms for data analysis or storage, or buildings and infrastructure.

The scientific scope MRC does want is specific: biological discovery of molecular and cellular mechanisms; the behaviour–biology interface, meaning the biological mechanisms driving human behaviour in obesity and how behaviour shapes biology; mechanisms of obesity complications including cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and multiple long-term conditions; mechanistic understanding of the health risks of weight-loss drugs, informing safe and sustainable weight loss without lifelong drug use; experimental medicine generating new mechanistic insight; and large-scale data-driven discovery including AI and machine learning methods.

The British Heart Foundation Component

BHF is contributing up to £12 million over seven years for a cardiovascular disease-focused component within UK-ORI. MRC asks applicants to identify clearly which aspects of the proposal align with BHF’s remit. The interest is in the interaction between obesity and the full breadth of cardiovascular conditions — obesity-driven pathogenesis of cardiovascular risk and disease, and novel approaches to treatment. MRC states this element should be ambitious and distinct, potentially delivered as a dedicated research theme with work programmes proportionate to the funding requested.

Practically, this means a bolt-on paragraph will not do. A reviewer panel including BHF will be looking for a cardiovascular theme with its own leadership, its own objectives, and a budget that visibly matches the £12 million envelope. MRC also notes it will share the application, including personal information it contains, with BHF so they can participate in assessment.

Who Can Apply, and Who Cannot Lead

The opportunity is open to organisations with standard UKRI eligibility. A nominated director acts as project lead, working alongside a leadership team with the full backing of the host research organisations. To be eligible you must have the expertise and experience to lead or contribute to an internationally leading investment of significant scale, show how you will strategically direct it and stay actively engaged, support a positive research culture, and focus on mechanistic research into multidisciplinary health challenges related to obesity.

Demand management applies. An eligible research organisation may lead only one application, though it can be a co-lead or collaborator on others. If you are at a large institution with more than one plausible bid, resolve that internally well before November — the research office will have to pick.

Businesses and charity or third sector organisations cannot apply as project lead or co-lead, but can participate as project partners. Charities and third sector bodies that are approved UKRI Independent Research Organisations still cannot lead an application, be part of the leadership team, or lead a UK research site — they can be project co-lead if making an important research contribution to a site. International organisations likewise cannot lead the application or a UK site; international researchers can be project co-lead (international), and MRC expects them to bring expertise or facilities not available in the UK, with clear indicators of commitment.

Where an applicant does not have a contract of employment covering the project duration, submitting the application constitutes the research organisation’s confirmation that contracts will be extended and that mentorship and career development support will be provided.

The Application: Seventeen Sections and Roughly 40,000 Words

This is a substantial writing exercise, delivered as answers typed into the UKRI Funding Service rather than an uploaded PDF. The main sections and their word limits are:

• Summary — 550 words, written as an elevator pitch for a diverse audience
• Vision — 1,500 words on the research challenge, its importance, and your strategy
• Approach — 10,000 words covering the seven-year plan with detailed specifics for the first four years
• Monitoring progress and measuring success — 1,000 words, with milestones and success measures for each key objective
• Approach to translational research — 1,500 words
• Approach to knowledge transfer and exchange — 1,000 words
• Approach to environmental sustainability — 1,000 words
• Data management and sharing — 1,500 words
• Leadership, operations and decision-making — 2,000 words
• Research culture — 2,000 words
• Training, careers and capacity building — 2,000 words
• Doctoral training — 500 words on the relationship with existing DTPs
• Applicant and team capability to deliver — 3,500 words, in Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) format
• Host organisation support — 3,000 words
• Partnerships and collaborations — 1,000 words
• Resources and cost justification — 3,000 words
• Equipment — 500 words, if requesting mid-range or large equipment

Plus ethics and responsible research and innovation, genetically modified organisms and biological risk, human participation in health-related research, and Trusted Research and Innovation questions where applicable.

Visual material is permitted where indicated — a Gantt-style project plan, an organisational chart, other diagrams — at a maximum of 5MB per image in JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP or WEBP. Each image needs a descriptive caption immediately underneath, outside the image, and that caption counts towards your word limit.

MRC is direct about letters of support: anything from people who are not identified project partners, simply expressing general support, will be ignored and will not be used in assessment. Each genuine project partner must provide a statement of support, and industry partners falling within the industry collaboration framework must supply additional information.

Host Organisation Support Is Assessed as an Equal Part

This deserves its own attention because applicants routinely under-invest in it. MRC does not require matched funding beyond the standard 20% FEC contribution, and reviewers are explicitly instructed not to weigh institutional matched funding. But the substance of institutional backing is assessed as an equal part of the application.

MRC expects the host to provide laboratory space, access to facilities and equipment, digital support infrastructure, estates management, human resources and finance services, underpinning of key staff positions, and access to the same additional funding and support available to other researchers. A 3,000-word section that recycles a generic institutional boilerplate will read badly against one that names the specific space, the specific posts underwritten, and the specific commitments with dates attached.

The same logic applies to research culture. MRC states plainly that it is not sufficient to describe your host organisations’ existing plans — it wants intended research culture outcomes, the actions to achieve them, and the timescales, success criteria, and evidence for each.

How It Will Be Assessed

Applications are first checked for eligibility and scope, with out-of-scope rejections notified by email around four weeks after the closing date. Those in scope go to a panel of independent international experts, who review against the published criteria. Applicants are then interviewed, after which the panel makes a funding recommendation. MRC and BHF make the final decision jointly, and outcomes are published on UKRI’s board and panel outcomes page. Feedback is provided with the outcome.

The criteria cluster around: the vision for UK-ORI and the strategy for influencing and advancing the field; the suitability of the director and leadership team; whether this represents a world-class strategic investment; the research approach and the monitoring framework behind it; the quality of the institute’s environment and culture; delivery capability across team, organisation and partnerships; and ethical and responsible innovation considerations.

MRC supports the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment principles, which is why team capability is submitted in R4RI narrative format rather than as a publication list. Reviewers and panellists may use generative AI only for language refinement of a review, under stated conditions.

Governance is part of what is being judged. A successful UK-ORI must establish an independent strategic advisory board that meets in year one and at least annually thereafter, reviewing progress against the performance monitoring framework you propose — a framework that will feed into the mid-term review. MRC asks you not to name proposed ISAB members as applicants or project partners.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Treating this as a very large project grant. The model MRC describes is a director-led single-site hub that both conducts research and coordinates the national programme, with partner sites adding distinct value and co-delivering. A federation of separately-run workstreams reads as the “series of project type research grants with no clear integration” that MRC has explicitly ruled out.

An open-ended research programme. MRC wants a compelling vision built around specific questions or critical knowledge gaps, with definable major strategic objectives achievable within the initial seven years, and clarity on what would require further leveraged funding. Applications should also say what can realistically be achieved in seven years versus beyond.

Missing the equipment gate. Mid-range or large equipment is only funded at 100% if it was requested and accepted at the outline stage. Discovering this in November is too late; anything else must go through the annual MRC equipment route in competition with the wider community.

Leaving the BHF alignment implicit. The £12 million cardiovascular component needs to be visible and distinct, not distributed invisibly across other themes.

Late research office engagement. Only the lead research organisation can submit, and research office and finance teams run checks on hosting arrangements and financial eligibility. On an application of this size, those checks are not a formality. If the lead is an NHS organisation, MRC advises checking early whether it is set up in the Funding Service, since additional steps may be needed.

Timeline and Next Steps

The webinar on Wednesday 2 September 2026, 2:00–3:00pm UK time, is the single highest-value action for any team seriously considering this. Registration is via the opportunity page, and it is the main forum for asking direct questions about scope and interpretation before the writing burden is committed.

From there, the practical sequence is: confirm with your research office that your organisation is not already leading another UK-ORI bid; email [email protected] early if you intend to include studentships or have eligibility or Trusted Research and Innovation questions; assemble the director, leadership team and partner sites; and build the R4RI and host organisation support sections in parallel with the 10,000-word Approach rather than at the end.

For costings and application writing, MRC directs applicants to their own research office first. Technical questions about the Funding Service go to [email protected] or 01793 547490, with phone lines open Monday to Thursday 8:30am to 5:00pm and Friday 8:30am to 4:30pm. General MRC funding and policy queries go to [email protected]. MRC asks that emails name the council and opportunity in the subject line and include the application reference number.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the outline stage or the full application? This is the full application stage. An outline stage preceded it, and some decisions taken there — notably acceptance of mid-range or large equipment requests — carry through and cannot be revisited now.

How many awards will be made? One. MRC states it expects to make a single award.

What is the difference between the £90 million and the £72 million figures? £90 million is the maximum full economic cost of the project across years one to seven. £72 million is the maximum MRC contribution, reflecting funding at 80% FEC with identified exceptions funded at 100%.

Can a charity or company lead? No. Businesses and charity or third sector organisations cannot be project lead or project co-lead, though they can be project partners. Approved UKRI Independent Research Organisations in the charity or third sector cannot lead the application, sit on the leadership team, or lead a UK research site.

Can my institution submit two applications? No. Demand management limits an eligible research organisation to leading one application, though it may be co-lead or collaborate on others.

Is matched funding required? No, beyond the standard 20% FEC contribution. Reviewers are instructed not to base recommendations on levels of institutional matched funding. Substantive, sustained institutional support is nonetheless assessed as an equal part of the application.

When will I know the outcome? Shortlisting is scheduled for December 2026, interviews and the funding decision meeting for February 2027, and applicants will be informed in March 2027.

Is the funding guaranteed? MRC states that funding for this opportunity is subject to approval of a full business case.

Official Links

• Funding opportunity page (full application): UK Obesity Research Institute — UKRI
• Opportunity-specific queries: [email protected]
• General MRC funding queries: [email protected]
• UKRI Funding Service helpdesk: [email protected], 01793 547490

Always confirm dates, amounts and eligibility against the UKRI opportunity page before committing effort, since UKRI updates opportunity pages during the open period.