UK medicines manufacturing to get innovation boost

According to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), £13 million is set to fund medicine manufacturing in the UK, through a focus on innovation in intracellular drug delivery, digitalisation and automation and nucleic acid medicines.

The investment aims to improve vaccines and shorten the time it takes to produce medicines.

Winners of a series of competitions centering on the aforementioned topics will obtain funding for UK medicines manufacturing. Seventeen new projects from the Innovate UK Transforming Medicine Manufacturing programme will benefit. A total of £10 million from the Chancellor’s ‘Life Sci for Growth‘ package will help to boost the UK’s health resilience, UKRI highlighted.

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Some of the projects chosen to receive funding to help innovate UK medicines manufacturing

Intracellular drug delivery

The award with the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) will help Vitarka develop an efficient manufacturing process for a delivery technology that releases siRNA drugs inside cancer cells.

Theragenix aims to develop the world’s first dry powder gene therapy formulation for bone graft augmentation.

RNAssist intends to simplify and reduce manufacturing cost and delivery to the clinic of highly active mRNA medicines without freezers, by developing universal stabilisers.

Digitalisation and automation

Microndesign plans to develop new methods for optimising pharmaceutical freeze-drying processes for the manufacture of injectable drug products.

Autolomous is initiating a project to improve cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing through automation or digitalisation. This could help reduce costs of CGT products.

A project by Rentschler Biopharma will utilise digitalisation and automation by implementing process analytical technologies (PAT) with an aim to increase efficiency in manufacturing.

Nucleic acid medicines

BioToolomics’ project aims to streamline mRNA medicine and vaccine production and improve quality. This will overall increase the ease of manufacture and reduce costs.

Intellegens and CPI are developing a novel machine learning-driven tool to advance oligonucleotide-therapeutic characterisation and manufacturing.

“This support for collaboration across the UK medicines manufacturing landscape to develop innovative nucleic acid medicines will drive forward digitalisation and automation technology,” commented Mark Talford, Deputy Challenge Director of Medicines Manufacturing at Innovate UK.

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