Warwick Business School
Operational Research and Management Sciences Group

Deadline for applications: 15 May 2017

The current “one-size-fits-all” approach to drug development is being challenged by a growing ability to treat patients as individuals, with patient populations identified for treatment by genetic pre-screening and diagnostics linked to a companion drug molecule; so-called stratified medicine. A major driver behind this development is the quickly growing biopharmaceutical industry. But as the technology is maturing, the ability to implement processes efficiently becomes increasingly critical for a company’s success in this new market.

To address the manufacturing, business and regulatory challenges and to ensure that new targeted biological medicines can be developed quickly and manufactured at a cost affordable to society, EPSRC has recently funded a £20Mio Future Targeted Manufactuing Healthcare Hub.

Associated with this Hub, Warwick Business School is offering one fully-funded PhD scholarship in the area of computational optimisation of biopharmaceutical drug development. The goal of this PhD project is to develop decision-support tools capable of integrating capacity planning and portfolio selection for companion-diagnostic-driven stratified protein medicine, in particular during the drug development phase. A particular challenge in this domain is the high degree of uncertainty due to uncertain demands, production rates and clinical trial outcomes. Furthermore, there are often multiple objectives and the evaluation of solutions is computationally expensive.