To develop a new generation of Vacuum Therapy device that incorporates the pumping system and associated electronics into the wound dressing technology to enable wider availability in the community for the rapidly growing number patients with long term non-healing wounds.

Project MARLIN will assess and develop a new concept for a modular floating platform system for offshore wind. The project will confirm technical and commercial feasibility of the novel method of construction and deployment of floating structures capable of supporting commercially relevant size wind turbines from ISO standard freight container-sized modules. Current demonstrator concepts in floating offshore wind require infrastructure of the scale unavailable or inaccessible in most of the world. Cost reductions needed to remove barriers to floating offshore adoption will come from development of methods not requiring large infrastructure and use of cost-effective mass manufacturing methods for making the construction modules. The proposed modular approach, with specially designed smaller and lighter building modules that could be towed out to sea for assembly, is significantly technically different from the current concepts and demonstrators. The concept will resolve the issue of prohibitively high cost of construction, logistics, and deployment in floating offshore wind. The main overarching research objective is to design the modules and the full structure, test those out as mathematical and physical models, carry out wave tank and sea conditions testing, and development of the manufacturing method. The project will deliver: design of a low-cost single module building block structure, design of a full modular configurable structure, creating physical and mathematical models, tank tests and sea test of physical models, analysis of manufacturing feasibility including a materials selection study and identification of coastal sites and new markets for adoption of the technology. Two of the University of Strathclyde engineering departments, AFRC and NAOME, will work together with the other members of the consortium. NAOME's role within the consortium is to develop a detailed hydrodynamic simulation model of the semi-submersible concept for two different types of floating modules - a passive one and a dynamic one which can have its buoyancy and orientation altered. Scaled models of the two module concepts under a range of different sea states representative of where the wind turbines will be deployed will be conducted. The results will be measured and analysed and a report provided to the lead partner on the findings from both tests and simulations. AFRC's role is to develop a finite element (FE) model for the initial and refined modules, to determine their suitability in terms of structural strength performance under different load cases. Once the best configuration for the module has been determined, the AFRC will develop a FE model for two different configurations of the final structural assembly made with the selected module and simulate the performance of the overall structures. A report will be provided, summarising the findings. Due to the complexity of the project, the geographical spread of the partners and the close collaborative nature of the project, AFRC will also support Frontier Technical in the management of the project.

To improve resource demand forecasting on New Product Development projects utilising a novel approach to predictive modelling.

TBC

This project will be conducted within the Healthcare Technologies EPSRC theme and aligned with the research areas of Chemical Biology and Biological Chemistry, Chemical Reaction Dynamics and Mechanisms, and Synthetic Organic Chemistry. The pharmaceutical pipeline requires the identification of effective tools for the dissection, interrogation and validation of new biological targets. Whilst photoreactive covalent fragment libraries provide an effective platform for the discovery of these tools in isolated proteins, their use in live cell environments is limited due to low levels of photo-crosslinking. We will address this shortfall by investigating the chemical reaction dynamics and mechanism of these warheads and define novel groups for the efficient and selective capture of proteins. The specific target proteins to advance and showcase this warhead development will be the palmitoyl transferase zDHHC enzymes. This 23-member family are responsible for the acylation of cysteine residues, which influences the function, localisation and trafficking of substrate proteins. We will target the ligand binding domain of these proteins with the aim of providing tools to enable the identification of target substrates for each family member examined and develop a method to determine selectivity (if any) of novel compounds. This will require the identification of promiscuous probes, able to bind each zDHHC enzyme and to determine the level of labelling through mass spectrometry. This will represent the foundation of a simple and effective competitive binding assay to screen for new hit matter and establish selectivity profiles in a single experiment. The development of each of these tools will provide a novel and powerful platform with which to investigate the zDHHC enzymes. In addition, the novel warheads will find application in the dissection and interrogation of alternative protein families of interest.