News story: Improving the manufacture of new medicines: apply for funding

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