Seventeen new projects have been chosen as recipients of £13m in funding for cutting-edge medicine manufacturing through the Innovate UK Transforming Medicine Manufacturing program. The UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, has announced the winners of competitions focused on nucleic acid medicines manufacturing, intracellular drug delivery, and digitalisation and automation.
The selected projects are spread across the country and aim to tackle various challenges. These include developing innovative technologies for nucleic acid manufacturing and intracellular drug delivery to enhance vaccines and therapeutics deployment. Furthermore, the projects aim to implement digital and automation technologies to expedite medicines manufacturing.
This funding is part of the Chancellor’s Life Sciences for Growth package, contributing £10m to bolster the UK’s health resilience. Among the companies receiving funding are BioToolomics, which aims to reduce waste and cost in vaccine development, Vitarka Therapeutics, which is developing a delivery technology for a cancer medicine, and Micron Design, which is working on new methods for pharmaceutical freeze-drying optimization.
Sarah Goulding, Executive Director at Innovate UK, expressed her enthusiasm for the range of innovative projects being funded through the Transforming Medicines Manufacturing program. She emphasized the ambitious vision to de-risk technology, boost economic growth, enhance the UK healthcare ecosystem’s resilience, and position the UK as a center of excellence in medicines manufacturing innovation.
Mark Talford, Deputy Challenge Director at Medicines Manufacturing at Innovate UK, also expressed his excitement about collaborating with these projects towards successful outcomes. He highlighted the support for collaboration across the UK medicines manufacturing landscape and its role in driving forward digitalisation and automation technology.
Here is the full list of projects:
– A project to improve the process efficiency and sustainability of the NanostarSieving platform for oligos synthesis on a large-scale.
– A manufacturing-based project to optimize and deliver efficiencies in the production of self-amplifying RNA for novel vaccines and therapeutics.
– A project to streamline production of mRNA medicines and vaccines, improving their quality and reducing waste.
– The development of a software tool to advance oligonucleotide-therapeutic characterisation and manufacturing through data and novel machine learning approaches.
– The acceleration of novel RNA treatments’ development through the integration of BiologIC’s flexible RNA manufacturing platform with DeepMirror’s artificial intelligence algorithms.
– The development of new methods for optimizing pharmaceutical freeze-drying processes in the manufacture of injectable drug products through the Digital Lyo project.
– The improvement of cell and gene therapy manufacturing through automation or digitalisation, reducing costs and increasing patient access to life-changing therapies.
– The creation of a customisable, mixed reality platform for digitalisation and automation of training in medicines manufacturing.
– The implementation of process analytical technologies to enhance efficiency and ultimately improve patient access.
– The development of liquid and lyophilised formulations for a next-generation peptide or mRNA vaccine platform.
– The creation of microBiofoundry-in-a-Box technology and supramolecular RNA-therapeutic-delivery systems for on-demand production of triple-negative breast cancer therapeutics.
– The rapid development of intracellular drug delivery innovations using combined technologies to produce and analyze lipid nanoparticles.
– The progress in developing Sixfold’s Mergo formulations for the economical, upscaled, and high-throughput delivery of siRNA therapeutics to cells-of-interest.
– The advancement of gene therapy in a powder for bone graft augmentation based on a proprietary technology platform.
– The development of a delivery technology, EndoPore, that releases siRNA drugs inside cancer cells.
– The creation of universal stabilizers to simplify and reduce the cost of manufacturing and delivery to the clinic of highly active mRNA medicines.
These projects represent a significant investment in advancing medicine manufacturing in the UK, contributing to the growth of the healthcare industry and ultimately benefiting patients.
