The Medical Research Council (MRC) is funding academic teams to run a high throughput screen (HTS) at AstraZeneca’s Discovery Centre in Cambridge, searching for small molecule starting points for new medicines. Successful teams get the same access as AstraZeneca’s own research and development staff: a curated library of around two million compounds, advanced compound management, screening robotics and a range of assay platform technologies that, together, do not exist anywhere in academia.
Applications close at 4pm UK time on 28 January 2027. The funding decision meeting is in March 2027 and applicants hear within ten working days of it. This is one of two rounds a year, and the next one opens on 29 January 2027 and closes on 8 September 2027, so if your assay is not ready yet it may be worth aiming for that instead.
What the funding covers
The MRC will support up to four projects a year. Each award is worth up to £270,000 at full economic cost (£250,000 from the MRC) and typically runs for 15 months, anywhere between 12 and 18. Projects are expected to start within six months of the funding decision.
Most of the budget is fixed. £20,000 goes to AstraZeneca to optimise and set up the screen, including trying alternative readouts and running a feasibility pilot, and £150,000 pays for the screen itself, both funded at 100%. Depending on how optimisation goes, between 100,000 and one million compounds from the library will be screened. On top of that, you can request up to £100,000 at full economic cost (80% paid by the MRC) for work at your own organisation. That covers follow-up assays in the screening cascade that cannot be run at AstraZeneca, a small amount of the project lead’s time, and travel and subsistence for a researcher from your team to work at AstraZeneca in Cambridge. Conference attendance is not funded.
That placement is strongly encouraged. A researcher can spend up to three months in total at AstraZeneca, split into shorter visits if that works better, helping to set up the assay and run the screen. If you do not request it you need to explain why, although leaving it out will not count against you. For a postdoc or technician interested in drug discovery, a few months inside a pharmaceutical screening facility is a rare chance to learn how industry does this at scale.
Does it fit dementia research?
The call is open to all disease targets. The previous round gave a strategic uplift to mental health and dementia applications, including Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, but this round’s guidance does not mention a thematic focus, so dementia projects compete on the same terms as everything else. Target-based and phenotypic screens are both welcome. Phenotypic screens, which will often be the natural route for neurodegeneration work using patient-derived cells, come with extra expectations: you must show you can produce enough cells for the screen, keep the number of steps and readouts workable at scale, link the readout to clinical outcomes, and explain how you will sort the different mechanisms that turn up among your hits.
You do not need a fully developed assay to apply, because the funding pays for assay development at AstraZeneca. The guidance sets out quality control benchmarks as a guide, including a Z’ above 0.5, signal to background above 3, a coefficient of variation below 10% on control plates and a reproducible tool compound, along with preferences for 384 or 1,536 well formats and as few assay steps as possible. The more of these you can evidence, the stronger the case that your screen will work.
This sits at the very start of the drug discovery pipeline, finding tractable hits that can be taken on into chemistry programmes. If you want a sense of what happens after that point, read our piece on when drug discovery fails, and for where computational tools are changing the early stages, our blog on enhancing dementia drug discovery with AI.
Who can apply
- You must be based at an organisation with standard UKRI eligibility, and you must direct the project and be actively involved in the work.
- If your contract ends before the project would, your research organisation confirms by submitting that it will extend it and provide the support you need, including mentorship and career development for early career researchers.
- You can submit only one application as project lead.
- Applications led by companies are not eligible, and projects cannot include other commercial partners. Project leads based at international research organisations are not eligible, apart from the MRC units in The Gambia and Uganda.
- Uninvited resubmissions of applications submitted to the MRC, UKRI or any other funder after 1 April 2026 will be rejected. If you are unsure whether yours counts, contact the MRC first.
Intellectual property and the agreement
AstraZeneca is automatically a project partner on every award, under a standard collaboration agreement based on the Lambert Agreement. The agreement cannot be negotiated, so the first letter in your project partner upload must come from the relevant office at your research organisation confirming it is willing to sign. Your organisation owns any intellectual property generated, and AstraZeneca has the first right to negotiate an exclusive licence, which it can take up at any point during the project or up to six months after it ends. If it does not, any jointly generated IP passes to your organisation. AstraZeneca may also offer to fund a project outright and take it forward directly with the team. You are free to turn that down and stay with MRC funding.
How applications are assessed
Applications go straight to an expert panel, with no external peer review. AstraZeneca has a nominated member on the panel, whose role is limited to confirming that a project is technically feasible, would pass its own internal gating criteria, is not blocked by third-party agreements, and has not already been screened internally or through a previous open innovation collaboration. The guidance scores feasibility on the readout’s relevance to the mechanism, reagent supply, assay technical readiness, hit triage complexity, timelines, throughput and cost.
The application is made on the UKRI Funding Service, not Je-S. The main sections are the vision (1,100 words, including a table covering the target, its type, mechanism of action, proposed therapeutic use and route of administration), the approach (2,500 words, including a schematic of the screening cascade after the initial screen), resources and cost justification (1,000 words), team capability in the Résumé for Research and Innovation format (2,000 words) and a data management plan. Before you start, listen to our podcast on grant writing tips from awardees and reviewers.
How to apply
Read the full guidance and the collaboration agreement template, and watch the recorded webinar for potential applicants. Questions about the call can go to highthroughputscreen@mrc.ukri.org, and your research office should be your first stop for costings.
Read the full details and apply
Visit funding web page
(https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/small-molecule-high-throughput-screen-using-astrazeneca-facilities/)
