Harwell: India investment to boost UK drug discoveries

The Indian Department of Science and Technology has invested £2 million into the UK’s ISIS neutron and muon source facility at Harwell in Oxfordshire to enable the development of a new Zoom instrument which will provide insights into how drugs interact with the body, as well as helping us understand the properties of important industrial materials, including polymers, emulsions, metals and alloys.

Funded through India’s Nano Mission programme this investment from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), will enable the ISIS team within the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to complete development of the new Zoom instrument ahead of schedule.

The financial commitment between STFC and JNCASR extends over the next five years and will enable UK researchers to benefit sooner from access to Zoom. The investment also gives Indian scientists access to the entire portfolio of instruments at the UK’s ISIS neutron and muon source.  

This new investment is one of a series of joint UK/India research initiatives worth up to £80m that were announced today by the UK science minister, Jo Johnson, and Dr Harsh Vardhan, India’s union minister of science and technology and earth sciences. They were announced during the India-UK Tech Summit being held in New Delhi and attended by UK and Indian prime ministers Theresa May and Narendra Modi. The TECH Summit has brought together British and Indian science and technology experts and businesses to connect and explore the future of India-UK collaboration. 

Speaking about these new collaborations, Johnson said: “The joint research programmes announced today show the depth and breadth of the relationship that exists between the UK and India. They will increase our collective knowledge, improve the lives of local people and help tackle some of the major infrastructure and environmental challenges that lie ahead.”

Professor Nagaraja, president of JNCASR, said: “This development is a giant leap in our collaboration in frontier areas of science benefitting the larger scientific community. The Indian researchers will be able to address more challenging questions through this neutron scattering facility”.

In particular, work with ISIS supports the Indian government’s Nano Mission launched in 2007, which aims to foster, promote and develop all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology which have the potential to tackle global challenges. As part of the agreement there will be contributions to the development of neutron instrumentation at ISIS. 

The earlier development of the Zoom instrument will be the first benefit to be seen from this collaboration. Focused on nanoscience, Zoom is one of four instruments being developed as part of a £21 million UK project which builds on a previous UK Government investment at ISIS of £145 million which built the second experimental hall Target Station Two.