£10m to fund new medicine manufacturing methods

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The Funding is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to support leading-edge healthcare.

This challenge will invest £181m over 4 years to speed up patient access to new drugs and treatments; it should return £1bn to the UK economy.

The projects must be led by a business and must include at least one SME. Innovate UK expects projects to have costs between £50,000 and £1.5m 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.

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.

For more information, click here.