Every aspect of product lifestyle involves some aspect of analysis: research, development, registration, specification, control, safety, use, re-use/recycle and disposal; and there can be no synthesis without analysis.
The UK needs a strong analytical measurement science community to underpin its innovation and research. Analytical science plays a crucial role in economic and societal dynamics. Positioned between fundamental sciences and final application, analytical science is at the heart of innovation. By uniting technology and method application under a shared focus, innovation in analytical science will greatly benefit.
The challenge lies in tying together every aspect of analytical science into an effective community structure – one that is coherent and impactful. CAMS Industry members have identified four key areas where innovation and research is needed to ensure that analytical science can provide a valuable support to all of our main stream industries.
Sensor and Photonics: The development of robust and fully validated point of use sensors and photonics will help supply critical rapid cost effective measurement for both online and at line monitoring for use in most of the major industry sectors: Pharmaceuticals, Biopharmaceuticals, Clinical, Food and Environment. The Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP) one of our member organisations has stated the need for rapid and robust “at-source” measurement technologies. Projects in this area are critical if the UK is to continue to be recognised by the global medicines industry as a world-class advanced centre for medicines manufacturing.
Novel Instrumentation: There are current limitations with existing “off-the-shelf” measurement systems associated with detection limits, specificity, quantitation and accuracy. Newer cost- effective technology and instrumentation which can be quickly brought to the market place is very much needed. CAMS members from UK based Instrument companies are keen to work on “industry led co-funded” projects to help develop and make available newer more novel instrumentation. If successful this will help further develop a state-of-the-art analytical instrument industry within the UK and Ireland.
Complex mixtures – separation and detection: Extremely high separation powers are required to fully characterize complex mixtures that are of crucial importance in many fields, such as life science (including systems biology), food science, renewable energy sources and its feedstock’s, and high-tech materials. There is currently no specific Center for Separation Science in the UK, a gap that other European countries have already started to address. A number of the identified industry projects will form the basis of separation science center in one of the Measurement Science Institute (MSI) member universities. It is hoped the establishment of the Centre will act as a catalyst for other Centre’s both in the UK and Ireland for this much needed and depleted area of measurement science.
Data Analytics: There are many challenges to modern measurement instrumentation with both software and “big data.” with some measurement producing so much data that it often takes considerable time to process and analyse the data, which is at odds with the high-throughput design processes. In addition in order use such data effectively it has to be both verified and validated. Many of the projects identified will require the development of integrated analytical tools or software packages to support large-scale characterization datasets. The projects will provide valuable training for the next generation of analytical scientist to enable them to produce user friendly, robust measurement data to benefit and support measurement enabling innovation.
The main goal of CAMS is to bring together various elements of analytical science to drive product development bases on accurate fast cost effective and fully validate methods and instrumentation.
