UK Public Sector Contracts & Tenders

The Catapult centres are a network of world-leading centres designed to transform the UK's capability for innovation in specific areas and help drive future economic growth - https://catapult.org.uk/catapult-centres/ Funded by Innovate UK, an agency of the UK government, Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is a government-funded, not-for-profit organisation whose primary goal is in helping the life science community push the boundaries of the drug discovery business by industrialising and driving the adoption of new tools and technologies for the sector. New industrialised technologies are vital for delivering new medicines to patients, faster. Therefore, we provide unique scientific capabilities, and act as a gateway to UK resources and expertise, supporting UK SMEs to drive the development and industrialisation of innovative approaches for the discovery of new medicines. By validating new ways of discovering medicines and driving key talent and expertise across the sector, we support the UK life sciences industry, SMEs, and innovators to deliver growth for the UK economy and maintain the UK's heritage position as a global leader in medicines R&D. As detailed above we provide scientific capabilities to support our sector through the use of Innovate funding to research innovative new capabilities of the delivery of fee for service commercial contracts. Our delivery is structured and tracked as projects and require us to be able to capture direct and indirect costs on a project-by-project basis to support invoicing. Whilst all contracts are managed via projects MDC has multiple different contract types which have significantly different invoicing and reporting requirements, examples of invoicing types range from Innovate UK which requires detailed reporting of all claimed items to commercial contracts that run on milestone completion and/or defined periodic invoicing. Our aim as an organisation is to ensure we drive efficiency of processes to ensure we can grow sustainably whilst ensuring our people are supported to focus on the value add and analytical activities rather than the manual and repetitive. We recognise that our systems are not currently fit for purpose end to end, and that the introduction of a coherent system architecture anchored by an ERP will be a key step in enabling us to move forward. We also recognise that our processes are not supporting efficiency and we would therefore seek to adopt the core system as much as is practicable with change happening within our business processes. To access the RFI documentation please go to the Proactis e-procurement portal and register at: https://procontract.due-north.com/Register. If you have already registered with Proactis, the RFI advert can be found at: https://procontract.due-north.com/Advert?advertId=046bad91-9900-ee11-8123-005056b64545.

The Advanced Technologies team at the Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is looking to expand its current advanced microscopy facility to support both our own growing needs and provide the UK SME community access to advanced molecular and cellular imaging. MDC is aiming purchase a confocal High Content Screening (HCS) instrument based on an automated well-plate inverted microscope, together with confocal and widefield functionalities. It is crucial for the HCS system to be flexible and provide fast and high-resolution imaging of a wide range of experiments. The instrument should be configured to enable the use of different sample formats (2D and 3D cell models, tissue sections, fixed and live-cell) and experimental types (drug dose responses, live-cell kinetic studies, phenotypic screening, RNA scope), using a large variety of well-plate formats and a wide range of fluorophores. In addition, the HCS instrument must be supplied with a high-end solution for high content image analysis, visualization and handling. MDC will be publishing an RFI regarding the High Content Screening (HCS) instrument during the week commencing 05/09/2022, if you wish to be involved please email procurement@md.catapult.org.uk referencing this PIN. This prior information notice (PIN) is a signal of future intentions to the marketplace regarding the procurement of equipment for the confocal High Content Screening (HCS) instrument. This PIN is not a call for competition. By publishing this PIN, MDC may avail itself of the opportunity to reduce the submission period from 30 days (with electronic submission) to 15 days (if the PIN has been published for at least 35 days and no longer than 12 months).