Research

 

CMAC’s leading manufacturing research programme is funded by the EPSRC Manufacturing Research Hub programme. The University of Strathclyde is the hub with delivery achieved by a multidisciplinary and collaborative academic team at the UK universities of Bath, Cambridge, Imperial, Leeds, Loughborough and Sheffield. Research with impact, has grown through new projects supported by EPSRC, InnovateUK, EU and industry. CMAC is a founding member of International Institute of Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (I2APM) with partners C-SOPS (US) and RCPE (Austria). As part of critical regulatory agenda CMAC and MIT organise a biennial conference with the FDA.

Overall Landscape and Project Portfolio

CMAC fits in the UK Medicines Manufacturing  landscape as shown in the left hand diagram below.  CMAC’s focus will be to deliver novel manufacturing technology that will enable industry to deliver better products, quickly, economically and sustainably. This will meet the demand for reduced development time and costs and to exploit emerging opportunities driven by the urgent needs of patients and consumers for more personalised product performance. 



The EPSRC CMAC Future Manufacturing Research Hub has a number of projects that are part of the CMAC portfolio managed from Strathclyde. The diagram above right shows the current portfolio which is underpinned by the Hub research programme. The entire CMAC research portfolio is made up of over 80 projects. Our Tier 1 partner companies support pre-competitive research through the CMAC membership structure and also collaborate with us on proprietary projects on a case by case basis.


The ambitious Hub Programme meets future needs of industry, consumers and patients by developing state-of-the-art design and modelling methodologies and integrated, efficient production & supply chain systems. This will enable fast development of customisable pharmaceutical and chemical products so they can be manufactured and supplied with consistent quality and controllable performance. The research programme will deliver integrated, fast, multi-technique assessments to define material-process-performance relationships with novel computer-aided design tools. The interdisciplinary cross-sector partnership will overcome key physical science, engineering and technology challenges for chemical solids manufacturing, to enable fast and reliable development of new flexible, intensive and sustainable manufacturing processes based on continuous manufacturing to meet the needs of industry, consumers and patients.

CMAC Partners

The Future CMAC Hub research programme is delivered by the seven partner universities with Strathclyde as the Hub and Bath, Cambridge, Imperial, Leeds, Loughborough and Sheffield as spokes. CMAC currently has over 130 people involved with over 70 researchers from the seven Future CMAC Hub partner universities and the additional Universities (Glasgow and Heriot Watt) that have DTC researchers with CMAC.