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The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF) reached a significant milestone this week with its total investment now topping £1 billion.
Photo: University of Glasgow
The UK-wide fund for research partnerships announced this week a further £63 million of investment. The total amount of money the fund has brought into university research in the UK now totals more than £1 billion.
First introduced in 2012, the UKRI UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF) asks universities to attract a further £2 from non-public sources for every £1 invested by the Fund. Its purpose is to support the development of state-of-the-art, large scale research infrastructures to enable world-leading research.
The Scottish Funding Council is one of the Fund’s partners alongside Research England, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland.
To date, Scottish universities have received £70 million of UKRPIF investment. Amongst the first wave of universities to benefit was the University of Dundee. An UKRPIF investment of £11.9 million represented a significant and transformative step towards the 2014 opening of its now renowned £26 million Discovery Centre.
Another early recipient was the University of Glasgow which was awarded £10 million in 2013 towards the development of a new clinical research facility at the South Glasgow Hospitals Campus.
The University of Edinburgh has received UKRPIF funding for two projects. A grant of £10.7 million contributed to the building of the Institute for Regeneration and Repair at Edinburgh BioQuarter which opened in January 2023. Rheumatoid arthritis, lung cancer and reproductive health are just some of the medical conditions being investigated at the new facility.
The University of Edinburgh also received almost £12.5 million towards the development of a flagship Building a New Biology facility as part of its plan to create an integrated research complex.
In 2013 the University of Strathclyde was awarded £11.4 million of UKPIF funding to enable it to develop CMAC, a multi-institution research hub for pharmaceutical manufacturing. In 2023, CMAC received a further £11 million for the CMAC Data Lab, a digital medicine manufacturing research accelerator.
Last year CMAC also received an additional £2.5 million for ‘Towards Net Zero Medicines’, an investment which aimed to transform the existing facility into a sustainable, digitalised ‘lab of the future’ for medicines manufacturing research.
