Innovate UK has up to £10 million to invest in projects that develop innovative manufacturing methods for producing medicines.
Funding is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to support leading-edge healthcare. This challenge will invest £181 million over 4 years to speed up patient access to new drugs and treatments. It should return £1 billion to the UK economy.
New approaches must deliver big improvements
The competition is seeking new approaches that can:
- improve commercially-viable manufacturing processes
- scale-up the production of new medicines through reliable and robust methods
- increase yield of active ingredient
- lower cost of production and goods
Medicines that are in scope are:
- advanced therapy medicinal products
- natural product medicines
- nucleic acid-based drugs
- prophylactic vaccines
- protein or peptide biopharmaceuticals
- small molecular weight pharmaceuticals
- virus and phage therapeutics
The competition will fund a variety of projects across different markets, technologies and medicines. These can include feasibility studies, industrial research and experimental development.
Competition information
- the competition opens on 12 March 2018, and the deadline for applications is at midday on 9 April 2018
- projects must be led by a business and must include at least one SME
- we expect projects to have costs between £50,000 and £1.5 million and to last between 6 months and 30 months
- projects with costs below £100,000 can be led by an SME working on its own or with partners, while projects above £100,000 must be led by a business working with partners
- businesses can attract up to 70% of their project costs
- a briefing event will be held on 20 March 2018
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