Hub Academic Feasibility Studies

Academic Feasibility Study funding was awarded to UKRI-eligible academic researchers for projects that complement the Hub’s core research programme and broaden the impact of current work to new areas

Awarded across multiple calls between 2019 and 2022

Partners	Project title
University of Manchester Department of Chemistry	Site-specific Fluorine-19 labelling of amino acids in proteins during cell-free synthesis, for NMR analysis of protein folding, assembly and aggregation
University of Warwick Warwick Medical School	Development of case-studies to demonstrate the impact of NICE cost-effectiveness assessment on fair pricing for targeted medicines
UCL Division of Biosciences: Cell & Developmental Biology	Identification of novel universal therapeutic targets for treating multiple types of breast cancer
UCL Cancer Trials Centre	Cancer trials data evaluation
Imperial College London Department of Life Sciences	An electron microscopy platform to improve manufacture of viral vector-like biotherapeutic delivery systems
University of Kent School of Biosciences	New to nature natural products for sustainable antibody drug conjugate (ADC) biomanufacturing
University of Warwick School of Engineering	Identifiability of fundamental models of ATMPs manufacturing
UCL Biochemical Engineering	T cell profilomics: towards simple transcriptomics predictors of expanded t-cell functionality

Strategic Feasibility Studies: Ethics

Awarded from a strategic workshop and themed call in 2021/22 to support exploration of key ethical issues and research questions related to the development, manufacture and implementation of personalised medicines.

Partners	Project title
University of Oxford Centre for Personalised Medicine, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics	Environmental impacts associated with the manufacturing of personalised medicines: social and ethical issues
University of Oxford Ethox Centre, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities	Scoping Social Biases in AI Driven Precision Medicine Manufacturing
UCL Science Technology Studies Vienna, Dept of Political Science, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity Oxford Law Faculty, HeLEX Centre	Feasibility of novel, relevant ethical legal and social implications (ELSI) research on key ethical issues of personalised medicine: responsible PM
UCL Science, Technology Engineering and Public Policy	Risk assessment of information management tools and digital infrastructures for advanced therapies manufacturing

Case Studies

The impact of NICE cost-effectiveness assessment on fair pricing for targeted medicines

Prof Nigel Stallard, Dr Peter Kimani and Mr Daniel Gallacher, Warwick Medical School; Prof Juergen Branke, Warwick Business School; Dr Elvan Gökalp, University of Bath

Support from the Hub enabled the project team to build a model of the decision-making processes for a healthcare provider and a pharmaceutical manufacturer when considering development of a potentially stratified drug. A case study based on a NICE appraisal was developed and uncovered a misalignment in preferences for developing a stratified or non-stratified drug. It was then demonstrated how preferences can be aligned by putting in place incentives for the development of stratified therapeutic medicinal products.

Identifying novel therapeutics targets to treat breast cancer

Dr Alexandros Kiparissides, UCL Biochemical Engineering and Prof Gyorgy Szabadakai, UCL Biosciences/Cell & Developmental Biology

Support from the Hub enabled the project team to develop a tissue-specific model for breast cancer cell lines using a combination of digital methods, specifically custom work-flows and algorithms with available metabolic modelling tools. When applied to patient and cell line data the team were able to distinguish distinct breast cancer metabolic phenotypes, and gain a wider, genomic-scale, perspective of metabolic differences between breast cancer genotypes.