£20m for drug test base at Newcastle University

Dec 5 2008 by Sam Wood, The Journal

NEWCASTLE University has won £20m funding to create a training centre to develop new drugs.

The centre for Biopharmaceutical Process Development will be dedicated to fine-tuning and speeding up drug development.

Funding for the centre was announced yesterday by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the UK funding body for science and engineering.

Led by Professors Elaine Martin and Gary Montague from the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, the centre will bring together expertise from across the university as well as some of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the North East and elsewhere in the UK.

Prof Martin said: “Our aim is to make the North East the UK leader in bioprocessing, attracting the best students to work alongside local industries to create a bioprocessing hub to rival the best in the world.

“The new centre will focus on taking a drug from the point of discovery through the long and complex process that is required to make it available to patients.

“We’ll be looking at ways to speed up this process, reducing the time between a new drug being found and patients actually being prescribed it.”

The Newcastle centre was one of 44 new centres for doctoral training announced by Science Minister Lord Drayson.

It is thought the Newcastle centre will produce 60 PhD students over eight years to help plug a gap in UK bioprocessing. Newcastle University is also setting up a centre to find new ways of managing the world’s most precious resource – water.

Led in the North East by Prof Tom Curtis, the centre will bring together some of the country’s leading researchers, water bodies and other industrial partners to put water sustainability into action.

Newcastle Science City chief executive Peter Arnold said: “Newcastle as a Science City has a strong foundation in bioprocessing, with world class research and close connections to the pharmaceutical industries, including collaborations with companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Avecia.

“This funding is wonderful news and will help ensure this region is at the forefront of both skills development and the sciences.”

Science City is working with development agency One North East to seek European funding to build on the investment. One North East chairman Margaret Fay said: “This announcement is excellent news, not just for the university, but for the region as a whole.”