£20.4m Collaboration to Streamline Drug Delivery

The STFC Hartree Centre is partnering with some of the UK’s leading pharmaceutical companies in a major new collaboration focused on enabling the manufacturing processes of innovative medicines to be designed digitally.

The £20.4m ADDoPT (Advanced Digital Design of Pharmaceutical Therapeutics) project, involving Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb, is a four-year collaboration between government, industry and academia to speed medicines to market in the most cost-effective way possible. Digital design techniques will be used to eliminate non-viable drug candidate formulations as early as possible, streamlining design, development and manufacturing processes.

The Hartree Centre’s world leading supercomputing facilities and expertise in big data analytics and computational chemistry will be applied to case studies provided by the partners, to achieve better design and predictive processes for innovative medicines.

Hartree Centre Business Development Manager for Life Sciences, Dr Adrian Toland, said: “The medicines industry is a major component of the UK manufacturing sector with a turnover in excess of £31bn. The industry’s sustainability and future growth will be enhanced by responding to drivers such as the increasing demand for personalised medicines.

“We are extremely excited to be working with our major industrial project partners, as they seek to make innovative and more sophisticated medicines available to patients quicker and more cost effectively. Big data is an essential ingredient in the design and development of our society’s next generation of medicines, taking time and money out of the innovation process. The Hartree Centre’s world leading facilities and skills in data analytics and modelling are pivotal to the success of this project, which will secure the UK’s position at the forefront of new drug development.”