A new Faraday Partnership to enable high throughput technologies in product and process R and D has been announced, with LGC leading the initiative
LGC is the core partner in INSIGHT - a new Faraday Partnership to enable high throughput technologies in product and process R and D Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, has announced a new Faraday Partnership in high throughput technologies (HTT) in which LGC is the core partner.
The aim of the Insight Faraday Partnership is to make HTT an integral part of new product and process development, leading to reductions in 'time to market' for UK industry.
Insight, one of six partnerships approved in the latest round, has been awarded an initial £2.2m over three years, with core funding to come from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and research funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
High throughput technologies, the generic term for an expanding range of experimental and developmental hardware, software and organisational processes, can increase productivity in R and D by orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. HTT systems incorporate chemical, material and process design, synthesis and formulation, characterisation, performance evaluation and informatics.
Insight chairman, Brian Warrington of GlaxoSmithKline, said: "The premise of Insight is that industry must adopt integrated HTT methodologies as a matter of urgency if UK competitiveness is not to suffer irreparably. Sectors affected span all those manufacturing, formulating and using compounds and materials, including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, polymers, plastics, metals, ceramics, household / consumer goods, food and drink.
HTT can have a significant impact on the performance of supply chains, not just individual firms, and on distributed manufacturing.
The potential benefits of HTT have yet to be appreciated across UK industry, particularly by SMEs." Richard Worswick, LGC's chief executive, said: "The key challenges of HTT to be addressed by Insight include accessibility, quality and quantity of information, novel probes for performance measurement and informatics.
Multi-disciplinary approaches to the realisation and exploitation of HTT systems will be the essential feature of a new generation of product and process developments, and will spur new approaches to R and D.
This will only be achieved through true partnership.
LGC is privileged to be at the centre of Insight, an innovative collaboration with several universities, which will involve world-class expertise from the UK across the chemical, physical and biological fields."
