Our Hub research is driven by the societal need to produce medicines and materials for modern living through novel manufacturing processes. The enormous value of the industries manufacturing these high value products is estimated to generate £50 billion p.a. in the UK economy. To ensure international competitiveness for this huge UK industry we must urgently create new approaches for the rapid design of these systems, controlling how molecules self-assemble into small crystals, in order to best formulate and deliver these for patient and customer. We must also develop the engineering tools, process operations and control methods to manufacture these products in a resource-efficient way, while delivering the highest quality materials. Changing the way in which these materials are made, from what is called "batch" crystallisation (using large volume tanks) to "continuous" crystallisation (a more dynamic, "flowing" process), gives many advantages, including smaller facilities, more efficient use of expensive ingredients such as solvents, reducing energy requirements, capital investment, working capital, minimising risk and variation and, crucially, improving control over the quality and performance of the particles making them more suitable for formulation into final products. The vision is to quickly and reliably design a process to manufacture a given material into the ideal particle using an efficient continuous process, and ensure its effective delivery to the consumer. This will bring precision medicines and other highly customisable projects to market more quickly. An exemplar is the hubs exciting innovation partnership with Cancer Research UK. Our research will develop robust design procedures for rapid development of new particulate products and innovative processes, integrate crystallisation and formulation to eliminate processing steps and develop reconfiguration strategies for flexible production. This will accelerate innovation towards redistributed manufacturing, more personalisation of products, and manufacturing closer to the patient/customer. We will develop a modular MicroFactory for integrated particle engineering, coupled with a fully integrated, computer-modelling approach to guide the design of processes and materials at molecule, particle and formulation levels. This will help optimise what we call the patient-centric supply chain and provide customisable products. We will make greater use of targeted experimental design, prediction and advanced computer simulation of new formulated materials, to control and optimise the processes to manufacture them. Our talented team of scientists will use the outstanding capabilities in the award winning £34m CMAC National Facility at Strathclyde and across our 6 leading university spokes (Bath, Cambridge, Imperial, Leeds, Loughborough, Sheffield). This builds on existing foundations independently recognised by global industry as 'exemplary collaboration between industry, academia and government which represents the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain R&D framework'. Our vision will be translated from research into industry through partnership and co-investment of £31m. This includes 10 of world's largest pharmaceutical companies (eg AstraZeneca, GSK), chemicals and food companies (Syngenta, Croda, Mars) and 19 key technology companies (Siemens, 15 SMEs) Together, with innovation spokes eg Catapult (CPI) we aim to provide the UK with the most advanced, integrated capabilities to deliver continuous manufacture, leading to better materials, better value, more sustainable and flexible processes and better health and well-being for the people of the UK and worldwide. CMAC will create future competitive advantage for the UK in medicines manufacturing and chemicals sector and is strongly supported by industry / government bodies, positioning the UK as the investment location choice for future investments in research and manufacturing.

Pharmaceutical R&D is a powerhouse in the UK, valued at £4.7 billion in 2019, equivalent to nearly a fifth of all R&D spending by industry across the UK economy. Projections indicate that it will generate an impressive £45 billion for the broader economy in the next 30 years from the 2019 R&D investment alone. However, it faces a significant skills gap, with traditional doctoral training programs failing to adequately prepare graduates for the dynamic and diverse demands of the industry. Research has tended to focus on empirical product development or specific process operations, leaving graduates unprepared to innovate in dynamic, multifunctional teams and explore diverse challenges, roles and career paths. This limitation not only hinders their potential but also stalls industry progress. Having a multi-skilled workforce is of paramount importance to accelerate sustainable medicine development and the introduction of ground-breaking patient-centric medicines. These elements are not only vital for enhancing the competitive edge of pharmaceutical manufacturing in the UK but also for guaranteeing that the future pharmaceutical industry is sustainable, resilient and human-centric - key pillars of the Industry 5.0 transformation. CEDAR will address this critical need by training 90 future leaders with multidisciplinary skills that combine pharmaceutical science and engineering with AI, data analytics, and robotics. CEDAR employs a cohort-based approach to equip graduates not only with technical proficiency but also with skills in leadership, collaboration, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and industrial and regulatory expertise. This well-rounded skill set will position them to thrive in modern, project-driven, cross-functional teams and therefore create excellent career opportunities. CEDAR's research projects aim to provide a digital, and advanced processing toolbox that covers the entire system from drug particle creation to precise prediction of their performance in the body. This will be achieved through the development and exploitation of digitally-enabled platform technologies - cyber-physical systems (CPS). These emerging technologies are crucial for accelerating drug development, particularly for emerging medicines like nanomedicines, peptides, and oligonucleotides where material sparing approaches are key and where patient-centricity is paramount. Recognising the transformative potential of CPS in the pharmaceutical industry, CEDAR's graduates will contribute innovative CPS solutions and pioneering methods that promise to revolutionise how future medicines are developed and manufactured. CEDAR draws upon the expertise of an internationally-leading, multidisciplinary team spanning four universities, working in conjunction with industry partners and non-profit organisations. With access to state-of-the-art facilities and dedicated operational support, CEDAR is exceptionally well-placed to address the skills gap and deliver the transformative research needed to drive the pharmaceutical industry towards sustainability, resilience, and human-centricity and deliver wider societal, economic and environmental benefit for all.

The holy grail of a cure for Parkinson's disease has been held back for decades by the extreme difficulty of measuring whether proposed new drugs actually improve the patient's symptoms and daily life. The TORUS research programme aims to solve that problem through a novel platform of sensing technologies for use in patients' own homes along with an advanced data fusion and machine learning pipeline that measures changes in specific mobility-related behaviours over weeks and months. Neurological disorders are the single largest cause of disability - in the UK alone there are 150,000 people with Parkinson's disease, the fastest-growing neurological condition. Parkinson's disease is incurable, and symptoms worsen over time, severely reducing quality of life and creating heavy burdens on the patient's family. The cost to the NHS each year is £375M, with families and social services contributing a further £877M (Centre for Health & Social Care Research, 2017). The number of people with Parkinson's disease in the UK is expected to nearly double by 2040. To get a new drug to market, pharmaceutical (pharma) companies need to evidence by a clinical trial whether the drug improves symptoms such as freezing when walking, tremor and the ability to undertake daily tasks such as standing up from sitting or moving between rooms. Currently, to gather this evidence, each patient in the trial must travel to hospital to be observed performing standardised tests by a clinician. However, these (at most) monthly "snapshot" samples of symptoms are a poor representation of the hour-by-hour variation of the patient's true symptoms. The vision of TORUS is therefore to create the capability to autonomously, continuously and objectively measure symptoms of illness (mobility-related activities of daily living) many times every day during the clinical trial of a new drug, in the patient's own home and for months at a time TORUS will achieve this goal by using a wrist-worn wearable integrated synergistically with AI-enabled cameras. The data from the wearable and cameras is fused to give metrics of the quality of mobility-related activities. The programme concluses with a clinical proof of concept.