Innovate UK has announced 17 life science projects will receive a share of a £13m funding pool to support the transformation of medical manufacturing.
The grant competition from Innovate UK was created to find life science firms that could demonstrate the adoption of digitisation and automation into drug development. The organisation also looked for examples of nucleic acid medicine manufacturing and intracellular drug delivery.
The funding included £10m from the Life Sci for Growth package announced by the chancellor in May.
The firms being funded include BioToolomics, which is working on a project to reduce waste and cost in vaccine development, Vitarka Therapeutics, which is developing a delivering technology for a cancer medicine, and Micron Design, which is developing new methods for the optimisation of pharmaceutical freeze-drying.
“There is a real breadth of innovation and collaboration across businesses being funded through Innovate UK’s Transforming Medicines Manufacturing programme,” said Sarah Goulding, executive director, healthy living and agriculture domain at Innovate UK.
“This underscores our ambitious vision to de-risk technology, boost economic growth, build resilience into the UK healthcare ecosystem and ultimately to make the UK a centre of excellence in medicines manufacturing innovation.”
Mark Talford, deputy challenge director, medicines manufacturing at Innovate UK added: “This support for collaboration across the UK medicines manufacturing landscape to develop innovative nucleic acid medicines will drive forward digitalisation and automation technology.”