📋 Tender Overview
Funded Value6229128Funded PeriodJun 19 - Nov 27FunderEPSRCProject StatusActiveProject CategoryTraining GrantProject ReferenceEPS0242201Efficient synthesis remains a bottleneck in the drug discovery process. Access to novel biologically active molecules to treat diseases continues to be a major bottleneck in the pharmaceutical industry costing many lives and many millions per year in healthcare investment and loss in productivity. In 2016 the Pharmaceutical Industrys estimated annual global spend on research and development RD was over 157 billion. At a national level the pharmaceutical sector accounted for almost half of the UKs 2016 16.5bn RD expenditure with 700 million invested in pre-clinical small molecule synthesis and 995 pharmaceutical related enterprises big pharma SMEs biotech CROs employing around 23000 personnel in UK RD. The impact of this sector and its output on the nations productivity is indisputable and worthy of investment in new approaches and technologies to fuel further innovation and development.With an increasing focus on precision medicine and genetic understanding of disease there will be to a dramatic increase in the number of potent and highly selective molecular targets identifying genetically informed targets could double success rates in clinical development Nat. Gen. 2015 47 856. However despite tremendous advances in chemical research we still cannot prepare all the molecules of potential interest for drug development due to cost constraints and tight commercial timelines. By way of example Merck quote that 55 of the time a benchmarked catalytic reaction fails to deliver the desired product this statistic will be representative across pharma and will apply to many comparable processes. If more than half of the cornerstone reactions we attempt fail then we face considerable challenges that will demand a radical and innovative a step change in synthesis. Such a paradigm shift in synthesis logic will need to be driven by a new generation of highly skilled academic and industry researchers who can combine innovative chemical syntis and technological advances with fluency in the current revolution in data-driven science machine learning methods and artificial intelligence. Synthetic chemists with such a set of skills do not exist anywhere in the world yet the worldwide demand for individuals with the ability to work across these disciplines is increasing rapidly and will be uniquely addressed by this proposed CDT. By training the next generation of researchers to tackle problems in synthetic chemistry using digital molecular technologies we will create a unique highly skilled research workforce that will address these challenges and place UK academic and industrial sectors at the frontier of molecule building science. The aspiration of next-generation chemical synthesis should be to prepare any molecule of interest without being limited by the sy
