The greatest challenge in oncological drug delivery is achieving successful penetration and distribution of the therapeutic agent throughout the tumour: billions of pounds have been spent to date in deploying biochemical approaches in an attempt to solve what is essentially an engineering problem, namely the transport of therapeutics from the blood stream to reach every cancer cell. OxCD3 will seek to transform both clinical and industry practice in drug delivery by demonstrating the value and feasibility of engineering approaches, involving a combination of stimulus-responsive nanocarriers and medical devices already in clinical use, for improved tumour uptake and therapeutic outcome. The Programme Grant will enable the creation of a sustainable, world-unique multi-disciplinary environment for combinational engineering of biology, chemistry and medical devices to improve drug delivery under a single roof. It is also expected to create a unique training environment for the next generation of young scientists working on combination therapies and biomedical nanotechnology, by providing direct exposure to regulatory and manufacturing issues encountered when translating laboratory research into production and clinical practice. A unique feature of the Centre is the capability to design both devices and drug delivery vehicles under a single roof. In the first 5 years, under EPSRC funding, up to 3 carefully selected "Device+Drug" exemplars will be manufactured to GMP, ready for Phase I clinical trials, to provide compelling evidence of feasibility to industrial partners and clinicians; in the next 5 years, a private-public partnership will be built to complete clinical trials of these exemplars using therapeutics of strategic significance to the pharmaceutical industry; beyond 10 years, full industrial sponsorship of the OXCD3 is anticipated, which will focus on addressing next-generation challenges in drug delivery (beyond cancer) in partnership with industry and clinicians. The transformative aim over 50 years is to position the UK as the world leader for multi-disciplinary drug delivery development, complementing its existing position as a drug discovery leader, from design to manufacture and clinical trials.

Since the beginning of humanity our societies have been based on commerce, i.e. we make things and we sell them to other people. Relatively simple beginnings led to the Industrial Revolution and now to the technological age. Over-generalising, the Far East are currently the masters of mass manufacture and the West are (or wish to be) the masters of advanced manufacture - the production of high-value goods, often involving a significant degree of innovation. To be able to manufacture goods in a cost-effective, environmentally-sustainable manner, quality control procedures are required. And quality control in turn requires an appropriate measurement infrastructure to be in place. It is a sub-set of this measurement infrastructure that is the subject of this fellowship. The UK government has been investing heavily in advanced manufacturing. In the academic arena, there are the sixteen EPSRC Centres of Innovative Manufacturing. To ease the pain of transferring academic research to the manufacturing sector, there are the seven High-Value Manufacturing Catapults (the Manufacturing Technology Centre being the main one of note here). For industry, there are a number of funding initiatives and tax breaks. To support this burgeoning UK advanced manufacturing infrastructure, there are a small number of academic centres for metrology - those based at Huddersfield and Bath are the main players. And, at the top of the measurement tree, there is the world-class National Physical Laboratory - a centre of excellence in metrology. But, there are still some gaps in the manufacturing metrology research jigsaw, and the aim of this fellowship is to plug those gaps. Coordinate metrology has been used for decades in the manufacturing industry as the most dominant form of process control, usually employing tactile coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). However, due to the slow speed of tactile systems and the fact that they can only take a limited amount of points, optical CMMs are starting to flourish. On the smaller scale, there are many optical surface measuring devices that tend to be used off-line in industry. When making small, high-precision, complex components, with difficult to access geometries, it is a combination of the surface measurement systems and the CMMs that is required. This requirement is one of the main aims of the fellowship - to develop a suite of fast, high-accuracy, non-contact measurement systems, which can be employed in industry. These principles will also be applied to the field of additive manufacturing - a new paradigm in manufacturing which is seeing significant government support and, in some cases, media hype. As with high-precision components, a coordinate metrology infrastructure for additive manufacturing is required, in many cases in-line to allow direct feedback to the manufacturing process. This is the second field of metrology that the fellowship will address. The outputs of the fellowship will be in the form of academic publications; new measurement instruments, along with new ways to use existing instruments; methods to allow manufacturers to verify the performance of their instruments; and the necessary pre-normative work that will lead to specification standards in the two fields (currently lacking). The academic world will benefit from the fundamental nature of elements of the research, and the industrial manufacturing world will benefit from the techniques developed and routes to standardisation. But, ultimately, it will be the UK citizens that will reap the greatest benefit in terms of new and enhanced products, and the wealth creation potential from precision and additive manufacturing.

This Centre for Doctoral training in Industrially Focused Mathematical Modelling will train the next generation of applied mathematicians to fill critical roles in industry and academia. Complex industrial problems can often be addressed, understood, and mitigated by applying modern quantitative methods. To effectively and efficiently apply these techniques requires talented mathematicians with well-practised problem-solving skills. They need to have a very strong grasp of the mathematical approaches that might need to be brought to bear, have a breadth of understanding of how to convert complex practical problems into relevant abstract mathematical forms, have knowledge and skills to solve the resulting mathematical problems efficiently and accurately, and have a wide experience of how to communicate and interact in a multidisciplinary environment. This CDT has been designed by academics in close collaboration with industrialists from many different sectors. Our 35 current CDT industrial partners cover the sectors of: consumer products (Sharp), defence (Selex, Thales), communications (BT, Vodafone), energy (Amec, BP, Camlin, Culham, DuPont, GE Energy, Infineum, Schlumberger x2, VerdErg), filtration (Pall Corp), finance (HSBC, Lloyds TSB), food and beverage (Nestle, Mondelez), healthcare (e-therapeutics, Lein Applied Diagnostics, Oxford Instruments, Siemens, Solitonik), manufacturing (Elkem, Saint Gobain), retail (dunnhumby), and software (Amazon, cd-adapco, IBM, NAG, NVIDIA), along with two consultancy companies (PA Consulting, Tessella) and we are in active discussion with other companies to grow our partner base. Our partners have five key roles: (i) they help guide and steer the centre by participating in an Industrial Engagement Committee, (ii) they deliver a substantial elements of the training and provide a broad exposure for the cohorts, (iii) they provide current challenges for our students to tackle for their doctoral research, iv) they give a very wide experience and perspective of possible applications and sectors thereby making the students highly flexible and extremely attractive to employers, and v) they provide significant funding for the CDT activities. Each cohort will learn how to apply appropriate mathematical techniques to a wide range of industrial problems in a highly interactive environment. In year one, the students will be trained in mathematical skills spanning continuum and discrete modelling, and scientific computing, closely integrated with practical applications and problem solving. The experience of addressing industrial problems and understanding their context will be further enhanced by periods where our partners will deliver a broad range of relevant material. Students will undertake two industrially focused mini-projects, one from an academic perspective and the other immersed in a partner organisation. Each student will then embark on their doctoral research project which will allow them to hone their skills and techniques while tackling a practical industrial challenge. The resulting doctoral students will be highly sought after; by industry for their flexible and quantitative abilities that will help them gain a competitive edge, and by universities to allow cutting-edge mathematical research to be motivated by practical problems and be readily exploitable.