Medicines Manufacturing: Labs of the Future

Overview

This Innovate UK competition will invest up to £7.5 million to accelerate the development and adoption of digital, automated and robotic technologies in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The focus is on enabling the transition towards “Labs of the Future”, highly connected, data-driven environments that improve speed, efficiency and scalability across medicines development and manufacturing.

Projects should demonstrate clear commercial potential, improve productivity and time-to-patient, and support workforce upskilling. The competition is particularly relevant for businesses developing advanced manufacturing technologies, AI-driven systems and automation platforms within life sciences.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to support the development and use of digital, automated, and robotic technologies to improve the speed and efficiency of pharmaceutical process development and manufacturing. These technologies will contribute to the vision of the Labs of the Future for medicines development and manufacturing.

Labs of the Future refers to the transition of traditional laboratory environments into highly efficient, intelligent, data driven laboratories where automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and connectivity will converge to accelerate research, development and manufacture of medicines. These labs will have the potential to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Projects must:

• Develop technologies and solutions that contribute to an integrated and intelligent Lab of the Future for medicines development and manufacturing
• Include expected success metrics and highlight value creation, such as improvements in productivity, cost, quality or speed
• Demonstrate integration with existing digital, automation and data systems to ensure seamless functionality
• Consider how solutions can be flexible, scalable or adapted across multiple medicine modalities and workflows
• Embed relevant regulatory requirements into the design from the outset
• Align with relevant data standards, ontologies and interoperability frameworks where appropriate
• Start at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 and progress to at least TRL 6, validated in representative conditions
• Include plans for workforce upskilling and reskilling to support adoption of new technologies

Key themes and topics

Projects can focus on one or more of the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
• Data-driven insights and decision making
• Data collection, integration and interoperability
• Internet of Things (IoT) and connectivity
• Technologies enabling continuous, 24/7 laboratory operations
• Laboratory automation, robotics and co-bots
• Digital twins
• AI-driven asset management
• Predictive and autonomous supply chains
• Process analytical technology (PAT)

Projects will not be funded if they:

• Do not relate to human medicines manufacturing
• Focus on medicines discovery
• Primarily develop a new medicine rather than enabling technologies

Project duration

Between 9 and 24 months

Must start by 01 October 2026

End by 30 September 2028

Award value

Grant funding request of between2per project

Funding rates

For industrial research projects, purposeful research that builds new knowledge and capabilities to improve products, processes or services, funding is available for eligible project costs of:

• up to 70% for micro or small organisations
• up to 60% for medium sized organisations
• up to 50% for large organisations

For experimental development projects, which focus on refining and validating innovations closer to market, funding is available for eligible project costs of:

• up to 45% for micro or small organisations
• up to 35% for medium sized organisations
• up to 25% for large organisations

Research organisations can share up to 50% of the total eligible project costs

Eligibility criteria

• The lead organisation must be a UK registered SME
• Projects must include at least one grant-claiming SME
• Collaborators can include UK registered businesses, academic institutions, charities, not-for-profits, public sector organisations or RTOs
• Subcontractors must be preferably UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs
• All funded project work must be carried out within the UK
• Projects must intend to exploit results in or from the UK
• Subsidy control rules apply under the Subsidy Control Act 2022