Manufacture of complex protein polymers for industry and medicine

Cells growing outside the body need a molecular scaffold to support them, but current scaffolds are expensive and crude. This project will manufacture cheap, pure, and customisable protein polymers to serve as that scaffolding. The problem is straightforward. Growing cells in the lab—for drug production, disease research, or regenerative medicine—requires a physical support structure that mimics the natural environment inside the body. Existing scaffolds cost too much and offer limited control over their properties. This limits how well cells grow and how reliably experiments or manufacturing processes work. If the research succeeds, it could lower the cost and improve the quality of cell-based technologies across medicine and industry. Drug manufacturers could produce biologics like Herceptin or hepatitis vaccines more efficiently. Researchers studying cancer, arthritis, or dementia could run more informative animal-free experiments. And stem-cell therapies for regenerative medicine could become more practical and reproducible. The impact would be felt in laboratories and production facilities, not in everyday life—but those are the places where new medicines and treatments are born.