How Libero Pharma secured a £1.4m Contracts for Innovation award

Not sure they were a fit, and burnt once already

Libero Pharma is developing a transdermal patch for ketamine use disorder, real, high-impact R&D with a clear clinical need. The uncertainty wasn’t the science. It was whether a pre-commercial procurement route like Contracts for Innovation was built for a company at their stage, and whether their answer to the brief would hold up against an assessor.

They had also used a well-known grant service before. Email-only support, two-week turnarounds, dozens of word-limited questions to fill in themselves, and a final draft stitched together from their answers. They came in expecting more of the same.

Validate first. Then write to the brief, not the roadmap.

1. 1

   A straight read on eligibility before anything was written

   GrantHero

   The scoping call was spent on one question: does this project genuinely answer the challenge the funder set? It did, and we could say exactly why, which became the spine of the bid.

2. 2

   One narrative, drafted by the bid-writer

   GrantHero

   Rather than asking Simon’s team to fill in forty boxes, Mark wrote draft v1 from the project and the call, so the application read as a single story from the first question to the last.

3. 3

   A review loop with the whole team in it

   Platform

   The team commented in threads on the passages that mattered to them, clinical detail, costings, and the draft moved to v2 without a single email chain.

4. 4

   A final check against the funder’s own criteria

   Platform

   Word limits, every scored criterion, a sourced figure where one was needed. Then each section went into the portal in the format it expected.

Funded, and transformative for the business

Libero scored above the typical funding threshold and secured an award of £1.4m. We can’t claim credit for an assessor’s decision, nobody can. What we can say is that the application went in with no avoidable weaknesses, answering the brief the funder actually set.

The funding has let Libero move the transdermal programme forward at a pace that wouldn’t have been possible on private capital alone.