Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) Limited’s Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 2024 is now published.
The Financial Year 2023/24 was highly challenging for international biotech. It saw a 50% decline in venture capital funding, driven by global economic forces and also – in the UK – a rise in operating costs, driven by inflation and the scarcity of key resources in skills and space.
This Annual Report shows that despite this challenging economic background, MDC’s overall contribution to medicines discovery in the UK continues to grow.
MDC has delivered significant year-on-year growth in collaborative research and development and introduced new national programmes. It has also demonstrated the development and diffusion of productivity-driving intellectual property through its first formal licensing contracts.
In this financial year, MDC has completed 49 partnered R&D projects and supported 60 new partners across the UK. Partners who have previously worked with MDC have subsequently raised private and public investment of £346m.
The report highlights more of MDC’s milestones over the past year, including:
- Delivering breakthrough science-based technologies, through its experts, that enable partners to progress their assets to the clinic and to discover new medicines in the UK
- Extending its portfolio of national programme delivery in areas of key patient need through the launch of new, multi-year programmes in antimicrobial resistance (PACE) and the national deployment of clinical Total-Body PET imaging systems (NPIP). MDC has also been appointed as the delivery partner for the UK’s Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission
- Driving national conversation and harnessing its expertise to produce an ongoing range of effective thought leadership initiatives to provide critical commentary and guidance for the sector, including the launch of the State of the Discovery Nation 2023/4 report
- 185 engagements with our sector, such as exhibitions and scientific poster presentations, expert panels, chair events, and lead speaker slots at key scientific conferences and being recognised and awarded by industry peers across the nation
Professor Chris Molloy, CEO of Medicines Discovery Catapult, said:
“MDC delivers to the nation in three distinct ways: de-risking productive innovations in drug discovery, de-risking private investments in SME biotech companies, and developing and running national research and development programmes. All of these are done through grant or commercial partnerships that create impact and commercial value. To date, MDC has actively helped UK companies drive over £1bn in private R&D investment into the economy. We make every experiment and every R&D plan count for the nation’s most entrepreneurial innovators.”
View MDC’s annual report for the year ended 31 March 2024 here >
