Public and private sectors fund bioprocessing research for drug development

The search for new medicines will receive a £10M boost this week as the public and private sectors unite to fund bioprocessing research. The money is now available for scientists to apply for from the Bioprocessing Research Industry Club (BRIC) which aims to bring academics and industry together to find ways of delivering new medicines from biological materials more quickly and effectively.

BRIC is a BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council)-led partnership with EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the UK biopharmaceutical industry, with support from the HealthTech and Medicines Knowledge Transfer Network, and was established in 2005 to fund the very best UK academics to carry out research to underpin the rapidly growing field of biological medicines.

As well as allowing scientists to undertake long term studies, this phase of BRIC is providing short term 'enabling funds' to address particularly difficult bottlenecks in the manufacture of biological medicines. These funds will allow the bioprocessing industry to call on world-class scientific expertise to ensure that new biological medicines can be made available to the consumer, quickly and cheaply.

Dr Celia Caulcott, BBSRC Director for Innovation and Skills, said: "BRIC is a fantastic forum for experts from academia and industry to join forces to further bioprocessing research in the UK.

"The UK pharmaceutical industry is a world leader, but its competitiveness relies on being able to call on the best expertise from academia. BRIC ensures that new and existing biopharmaceutical treatments are underpinned by excellent science."

This, the second phase of BRIC (BRIC2), aims to continue the success of the initial 5 year phase which has already committed £13M of spending in bioprocessing research. BRIC2 will focus on 5 priority areas, namely:
- Bioprocessing research challenges for protein products and their host cell producers
- High-throughput bioprocess development
- Effective modelling of whole bioprocesses
- Robust and effective analytics for bioprocessing
- Bioprocessing research for cellular products