Innovative technologies for nucleic acid medicines manufacturing

Overview

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £5 million in innovation projects. These will be to develop and commercialise innovative solutions for the manufacturing of nucleic acid medicines.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to improve the resource efficiency, productivity and scalability for the manufacture of nucleic acid medicines in the UK.

Our objective is to stimulate the development and implementation of innovative technologies to improve the resource efficiency, productivity and ability to manufacture nucleic acid-based medicine. This must allow for growth at scale including, but not limited to, emerging products targeting large patient populations.

Your project must be focused on the manufacturing of the active nucleic acid ingredient. You must be able to demonstrate an improvement in resource efficiency, productivity or throughput as compared with current manufacturing technology utilising a recognised metric, for example, with process mass intensity.

The nucleic acid-based active ingredients in scope for this competition include but are not limited to:

small activating ribonucleic acid (RNA)
messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), including self-amplifying mRNA
antisense RNA or oligonucleotides
small interfering, short interfering or silencing RNA
short hairpin RNA
Micro RNA
DNA

Specific Themes

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

in-process monitoring, control and release testing
maintenance of product critical quality parameters such as purity, potency and viability
product characterisation
process challenges for increasing the scale of production
transfer of technology from small-scale manufacturing to a good manufacturing practice (GMP) manufacturing facility
lowering of the cost of goods as final output
increase in yield of active ingredient
increase in speed of production cycle
methods to increase the flexibility of established manufacturing facilities
adaptation of processes from batch to continuous production

Eligibility

Your project must:

have total costs between £100,000 and £2 million
start by 1 June 2023
end by 31 May 2025
last between 12 and 24 months
carry out all of its project work in the UK
intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

You must only include eligible project costs in your application.

Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian or Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or Belarusian source.

To lead a project your organisation must:

be a UK registered business of any size or a research and technology organisation (RTO), not for profit or public sector organisation
collaborate with other UK registered organisations
be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

business of any size
academic institution
charity
not for profit
public sector organisation
research and technology organisation (RTO)

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project.

Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

A business, research and technology organisation (RTO), charity, not for profit or public sector organisation can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications.

You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.

Exclusions

Innovate UK are not funding projects that are:

wholly lipid nanoparticle, bioconjugation or other formulated nucleic acid product or process development
for medicines discovery
manufacturing process innovations using a non-human medicine as the product

Innovate UK cannot fund projects that are:

dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Funding Costs

Up to £5 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.

For industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
up to 50% if you are a large organisation

The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 80% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them. Of that 80% you could get funding for your eligible project costs of up to:

80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a Je-S registered institution such as an academic
100% of your project costs if you are an RTO, charity, not for profit organisation, public sector organisation or research organisation

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