Healthy Living and Agriculture Review 2025 – A focus on Future Medicines

Targeted medical interventions

To mark the launch of our Healthy Living and Agriculture Review we’re sharing a series of themed insights exploring the UK-wide impact of business-led innovation across our four core areas: AgriFood Systems, Healthy Lives, Health Tech, and Future Medicines.

There is a growing need for innovations that make healthcare more patient-centric, enabling the right medicine to be delivered at the right time and the right dose, and the UK’s world-class research and innovation sector is well placed to deliver this.

Through our Future Medicines programmes, Innovate UK is supporting business growth in the discovery, development, and manufacture of more targeted medical interventions, and accelerating the commercialisation of life-changing therapeutics and vaccines.

We are investing in and supporting innovations that address areas of unmet clinical need, such as antimicrobial resistance and cancer, and where there is a UK business opportunity to do so. We’re also helping businesses access our innovation system, understand clinical demand, seize market opportunities, and scale efficiently while remaining anchored in the UK to drive economic growth, underpinned by our shared culture of scientific innovation.

Enabling business-led innovation in the discovery and development of new therapeutics and vaccines in areas of unmet need

Innovative approaches are needed to take advantage of opportunities in immunotherapy and cancer vaccine discovery and through our Cancer Therapeutics programme, we’re helping to accelerate the commercialisation of new therapies, as well as addressing unmet medical needs of treating childhood cancers.

This programme has supported a range of projects, including Infinitopes Precision Innunomics, a cancer vaccine company with world-leading platforms in precision antigen discovery.

Accelerating the development of targeted medical interventions

We’re helping to accelerate the development and commercialisation of targeted therapies while growing the capacity and capability of UK businesses to produce innovative medical treatments at scale.

In 2023, we launched PACE (Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy), with partners LifeArc and Medicines Discovery Catapult, to help innovative researchers in academia and SMEs develop their early-stage antimicrobial drug and diagnostics projects for onward progression and investment. We’ve awarded £10m across 11 projects from our first funding call focused on antibacterials therapeutics and finalising projects from our second round of investment in diagnostic innovations.

Driving the development and adoption of flexible, agile, scalable, and sustainable processes for manufacturing medicines

Building on the legacy of the UKRI Medicines Manufacturing Challenge, our Transforming Medicines Manufacturing (TMM) programme facilitates the development of technologies that improve productivity and resource efficiency, while promoting their adoption across the sector to ensure scalability and widespread use.

Our £10m investment in the Intracellular Drug Delivery Centre (IDDC) allows innovators to access new capabilities in intracellular drug delivery. Led by CPI in partnership with the Medicines Discovery Catapult and three leading universities, IDDC is helping accelerate the development of new formulations for the delivery of RNA medicine, unlocking greater access to cutting-edge, cost-effective vaccines and therapeutics for patients.

Building an ecosystem for the development and adoption of advanced medicines manufacturing technologies

We want the UK to be the global hub for de-risking and testing novel manufacturing technologies, driving sector growth, boosting healthcare resilience, and enabling the manufacture of innovative new therapeutics. Our TMM programme supports this by backing innovation centres, catapults, and the skilled workforce behind them.

One of our TMM projects, Touchlight Genetics, is working with the National Physical Laboratory to develop a novel ‘Megabulb DNA (mbDNATM)’ platform for the scaled up GMP-compatible manufacture of a long single-stranded DNA product. This breakthrough will improve the safety and efficacy of advanced therapies, helping bring them to patients faster.

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Discover how business-led innovation is delivering real impact in Future Medicines and explore the full story behind these case studies.

Explore our other perspectives on AgriFood Systems, Healthy Lives and Health Tech.

If you think Innovate UK Business Connect can help you, or if you have any feedback on this review, please get in touch.