Reducing lead times of new medicinal drugs to the market by reducing process development and clinical testing timeframes is a critical driver in increasing European (bio)pharmaceutical industry competitiveness. Despite new therapeutic principles (e.g. the use of pluripotent stem cells, regenerative medicine and treatments based on personalised medicine or biosimilars) or regulatory initiatives to enable more efficient production, such as Quality by design (QbD) with associated Process Analytical Technology (PAT) tools , the slow progress in the development of new bioactive compounds still limits the availability of cheap and effective medicines. In addition, the competitiveness of European (bio)pharma industry is impacted by the unavailability of suitably trained personnel. Fundamental changes in the education of scientists have to be realised to address the need for changes in the traditional ‘big pharma’ business model and the focus on ‘translational medicine – more early stage clinical trials with patients, more external innovation and more collaboration’ . These changes in education should be based on combining cutting-edge science from the early stage of product development through to manufacturing with innovation and entrepreneurship as an integral part of the training. The Rapid Bioprocess Development ITN, employing 15 ESRs, brings together industrialist and academic experts with its main aim to address this critical need by developing an effective training framework in rapid development of novel bioactive molecules from the very early stages of potency and efficacy testing to the biomanufacturing process characterisation and effective monitoring. The main focus of the research is on oncology related proteins and recombinant proteins to be used in diabetes treatment, although the resulting monitoring and modelling methods will be applicable to other bioactive molecule process development as demonstrated by validation on a range of relevant bioactives.

Quantum technology holds the promise of enabling next generation computing, communications and sensing systems. However, the size, cost and scalability of current devices prevents them from reaching their full potential. Photonics is one of the key enabling technologies for quantum technology. In particular, photonics integrated circuits (PICs) with their wafer-level manufacturing based on microfabrication technologies can provide the reduction in size and cost and enable next generation scalable quantum technologies. To fully achieve this goal, an universal PIC technology that can serve most quantum applications is needed. In QU-PIC, we selected the Al2O3 integrated photonics platform as backbone technology for the development of quantum PICs thanks to its excellent low propagation loss performance and wide operating spectral region from the ultraviolet (200 nm) until the mid-infrared. A large range of PIC building blocks is developed in QU-PIC, focusing on areas where materials or integration technologies are not yet available. Several light sources, including multiwavelength tunable lasers with operation at 399 nm, 411 nm and 935 nm on the PIC, UVC external cavity lasers emitting at 280 nm, sources of squeezed photons, single photon detectors, programmable ASICs and the required packaging and assembly technologies will be investigated. An open PDK will group all the developed quantum building blocks to accelerate innovation from the initial idea to an actually manufactured system. Two application demonstrators will be implemented using the developed building blocks, namely a source of GKP states for quantum processing and an atomic clock based on Yb+ ions for quantum sensing. It is the ambition of QU-PIC to secure a full European supply chain to establish Europe’s Sovereignty and manufacturing capabilities in photonics integrated circuits for quantum.