Seventeen research projects across seven Scottish universities have been awarded £2.92 million to help develop their commercial potential.
The Scottish Government’s Proof of Concept fund will support work ranging from prototype development to market analysis and investor pitches. The 2026-27 awards follow a pilot in 2025-26, when 18 projects shared £2.95 million.
Projects receiving support include Kinera at Heriot-Watt University, which is developing a wearable health monitoring device for people with Parkinson’s disease to help clinicians make more personalised treatment decisions.
At the University of St Andrews, Merra-log is developing a low-cost environmental monitoring system to collect and transmit marine and freshwater data in near real time. Scensai, at the University of Aberdeen, is working on an affordable handheld chemical sensing device for the drinks industry.
A separate University of Aberdeen project has received £124,000 to develop and validate prototype lateral-flow tests for chronic gastrointestinal disorders, with potential use in primary care.
Professor Jenna Gregory, who leads the project, said: “The support of the Scottish Government is helping us take an important step towards improving the diagnosis of chronic gastrointestinal disorders, which affect millions of people and place a substantial burden on patients and healthcare services.
“This funding will enable us to advance a promising technology, bringing us closer to a practical test that could be used in primary care.”
Stephen Flynn, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism & Transport, said: “The Scottish Government has now invested nearly £6 million over the last two years to realise the economic potential of more Scottish spinout companies starting and succeeding.
“Scotland’s universities have been the birthplace of some of the world’s greatest ideas and inventions for centuries – ideas and inventions which have improved lives and solved problems across the world – and it is vital this innovation continues to be nurtured.”
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Among the projects supported in the earlier pilot, the University of Glasgow’s Critical Technologies Accelerator received £125,000 in 2025-26 to develop a new coupler design for silicon-photonic microchips.
Research Fellow Andrew Greer said the team had doubled its grant income since receiving the award and successfully developed a foundry scale-up process. It is now delivering demonstrators and working with commercialisation partner STL Tech towards an invitational application to the Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spinout Programme.
