RoslinCT Gets £7.25M Grant for Digital Cell Therapy Manufacturing

RoslinCT has secured a £7.25 million research and development grant from Scottish Enterprise to advance digital cell therapy manufacturing. The funding is earmarked for R&D work aimed at modernising how the company produces cell-based therapies, with digitisation positioned as the core lever for improving the manufacturing process.

The award comes from Scottish Enterprise, the national economic development agency, underscoring public-sector backing for digital upgrades in advanced therapeutics production rather than a purely private capital raise.

Cell therapy manufacturing has long been a bottleneck for the broader advanced therapies sector: processes are often manual, variable and difficult to scale consistently from batch to batch. Digitising production — through data capture, process automation and tighter quality control — is one of the few levers that can make these therapies more reproducible and more commercially viable at volume.

For leaders in digital transformation, this is a reminder that modernisation isn't confined to software and services; it extends into physical production environments where data infrastructure and automation determine whether a therapy can move from lab-scale promise to dependable, repeatable supply. Public R&D funding aimed squarely at digitisation signals that regulators and economic bodies increasingly see manufacturing reliability as a transformation problem, not just a scientific one.

— £7.25 million — the value of the Scottish Enterprise R&D grant awarded to RoslinCT.

A grant like this is often read as a technology story, but it's really an operating-model story: the “customer” here is every patient waiting on a therapy whose availability depends on consistent, scalable manufacturing.

Digitising a manufacturing line is not transformation by default — it's only transformation if it closes the gap between what a therapy can do in trials and what it can reliably deliver at scale. The real test for RoslinCT, and for anyone using R&D funding to "go digital," is whether the investment measurably reduces batch variability and turnaround time, not just whether it adds sensors and dashboards. Operators who treat manufacturing digitisation as a service-design problem — with the same rigor they'd apply to a customer journey — are the ones who actually convert funding into dependable outcomes for the people on the other end of the supply chain.