Many OPIGlets found their way into a DPhil in Protein Informatics through our Systems Approaches to Biomedical Sciences Industrial Doctoral Landscape Award, which was open to applicants 2009-2024. This innovative course, based at the MPLS Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), offered six months of intensive taught modules prior to starting PhD-level research, allowing students to upskill across a diverse range of subjects (coding, mathematics, structural biology, etc.) and to go on to do research in areas significantly distinct from their formal Undergraduate training. All projects also benefited from direct co-supervision from researchers working in the Pharmaceutical industry, ensuring DPhil projects in areas with drug discovery translation potential. Regrettably, having twice successfully applied for renewal of funding, we were unsuccessful in our bid to refund SABS in 2024.
Happily though, we can now formally announce that our bid for a direct successor to SABS, the Transformative Technologies in Pharmaceutical Sciences IDLA, has been backed by the BBSRC, and we will shortly be opening for applications for entry this October [2026]. As someone who benefited from the interdisciplinary training and industry-adjacency of SABS, I’m thrilled to be a co-director of this new Programme and to help deliver this course to a new generation of talented students.
TTPS will be a joint initiative between GSK and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton. Collaboratively, our project focus will be on mathematical and computational methods that reimagine the way we understand health and conduct drug discovery. At the start, all students will conduct six months of a bespoke training course at Oxford (wholly refreshed from the original SABS offering to ensure contemporary relevance) before undertaking two 3-month mini projects joint between GSK and one of our partner institutions, and committing to one of these for the remaining three years (the Programme lasts four years, start to finish).
En route, students will benefit from a three-month internship at GSK where they will be embedded in an R&D team and experience real-world drug discovery. Successful completion of the course leads to the award of a DPhil (if research conducted at Oxford) or PhD (if research conducted at Cambridge or Southampton).
TTPS will be able to offer up to eight fully-funded studentships per year to candidates with strong potential to become future computational biotechnology leaders. Applicants should note that, for practical reasons, only Oxford and Cambridge will be options for the research component of the course this year. Southampton will join TTPS as an option for PhD research from 2027.
If this has whet your appetite to find out more, please explore our website (hot-off-the-press!) More precise information on the application process will be posted here by the end of February.
For those interested in industry-partnered web-lab or hybrid projects relevant to Pharmaceutical science, I would encourage you to explore our ILESLA Programme, also based at the MPLS DTC. The ILESLA application window has passed for 2026 entry, but will open later this year for the cohort starting in October 2027.
