Groundwater provides a significant proportion of water supplies in the UK and the majority of our domestic water in many parts of southern, south-eastern and eastern England. It is an important source for agricultural irrigation and for industry in the UK. It supports flow in many of the UKs most iconic rivers, such as the Chalk streams of the Chilterns and the North and South Downs, maintaining healthy ecosystems, and providing amenity value and supporting livelihoods associated with those groundwater-dependent rivers. When managed appropriately, it is a dependable, resilient source of water. However, due to natural year-on-year variations in rainfall, it is susceptible to major droughts. For example, during the last major groundwater drought in the UK in 2010-12 seven water companies in south and east England had to impose temporary use bans (colloquially known as 'hosepipe bans') on about 20 million people in spring of 2012 with the environment and farming sectors also significantly adversely affected by restrictions on their use of water. Consequently, there is a need for a much better understanding of groundwater droughts and their impacts to support improvement in planning for and managing groundwater droughts in the UK. Groundwater droughts are defined as below normal levels of groundwater and have a number of unwelcome effects, such as reduced production of groundwater from boreholes, and the drying up of groundwater-dependent rivers with resulting implications for wildlife and livelihoods. The Natural Environment Research Council is currently funding the 'UK Droughts and Water Scarcity Programme' providing strategically important research to improve characterisation and prediction of episodes of drought in the UK. However, major episodes of drought take time to develop and affect large areas. For example, when there is a long groundwater drought in the UK, e.g. 2010-12, that same drought also affects large parts of continental Europe. As a result, there is significant benefit to be gained for the UK by understanding the development and impacts of major droughts at the European scale. However, there is currently no co-ordination of relevant groundwater information or groundwater drought research across Europe, and currently groundwater drought status cannot be monitored or its impacts assessed at the continental scale. This project, the Groundwater Drought Initiative (GDI), aims to address these shortcomings leading to significant improvements in groundwater drought characterization and impact assessment for the UK and continental Europe. The GDI will build on and add value to two existing NERC-funded projects (the Historic Droughts and IMPETUS projects) in the current NERC UK Droughts and Water Scarcity Programme and will work with partners from BOKU, Austria; University of Rouen, France; University of Freiburg, Germany; University of Oslo, Norway; Wageningen University, Netherlands; Comenius University, Slovakia; and, CISC, Spain as well as other researchers across Europe. The GDI will produce and publish the first pan-European assessment of groundwater drought status (from 1960 to present), and will analyse the most recent European groundwater droughts. The GDI will investigate what groundwater droughts mean for people - for the first time systematically investigating the impacts of recent groundwater droughts by comparing the results of the new European-scale groundwater drought status assessments with information about impacts of previous recent droughts held in an existing on-line database (the European Drought Impact Report Inventory, EDII). Central to all the activities of the GDI will be the establishment of a new network to co-ordinate the work of groundwater drought specialists and related data and information across Europe, ensuring the dissemination, use and maintenance of the common resources to enable future impactful research into groundwater droughts.

The bioprocess industry manufactures novel macromolecular drugs, proteins, to address a broad range of chronic and debilitating human diseases. The complexity of these protein-based drugs brings them significant potential in terms of potency against disease, but they are also much more labile and challenging to manufacture than traditional chemical drugs. This challenge is continuing to increase rapidly as novel technologies emerge and make their way into new therapies, such as proteins conjugated to chemical drug entities, DNA, RNA or lipids, or fusions of multiple proteins, which increase their potency and targeted delivery in patients. The UK holds a leading position in developing and manufacturing new therapies by virtue of its science base and has unique university capabilities underpinning the sector. Whilst revenues are large, ~£110bn in 2009 on a worldwide basis, there are huge pressures on the industry for change if demands for healthcare cost reduction and waste minimisation are to be met, and populations are to benefit from the most potent drugs becoming available. A sea change in manufacturing will be needed over the next decade if the potential of modern drugs are to make their way through to widespread distribution. Moreover there is a widely accepted skills shortage of individuals with fundamental "blue-skies" thinking capability, yet also with the manufacturing research training needed for the sector. The proposed EPSRC CDT will deliver a national capability for training the next generation of highly skilled future leaders and bioprocess manufacturing researchers for the UK biopharmaceutical sector. They will be capable of translating new scientific advances both in manufacturing technologies and new classes of macromolecular products into safely produced, more selective, therapies for currently intractable conditions at affordable costs. This is seen as essential where the rapid evolution of biopharmaceuticals and their manufacturing will have major implications for future medicine. The CDT will be a national resource linked to the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing (CIM) in Emergent Macromolecular Therapies (EP/I033270/1), which aims to tackle new process engineering, product stability, and product analysis challenges that arise when manufacturing complex therapies based on radically new chemistry and molecular biology. The CDT will embed PhD students into the vibrant research community of the top UK Institutions, with collaborations overseen by the EPSRC CIM, to enable exploration of new process engineering, modelling, analysis, formulation and drug delivery techniques, and novel therapies (e.g. fusion proteins, and chemical drugs conjugated to antibodies), as they emerge from the international science and engineering community. Alignment to the EPSRC CIM will ensure projects strategically address key bioprocess manufacturing challenges identified by the industrial user group, while providing a cohort-based training environment that draws on the research excellence of the ESPRC CIM to maximise impact and knowledge transfer from collaborative partners to research led companies.