**The Northern Ireland Precision Biomarkers and Therapeutics Consortium (NIPBT)** is a partnership of Life and Health Science (LHS) companies and Academia, aligned to the strategies of both the Departments of Health and Economy of the NI devolved government to enhance health and wealth creation for NI citizens. Currently, NI has a significant presence in the LHS sector: Almac,Randox and a growing cluster of innovation-driven SMEs. This is complemented by academic strengths at Queen's University Belfast in experimental medicine, drug delivery, cancer research, health data analysis, and the Precision Medicine Centre of Excellence (PMCOE); as well as Ulster University's track record in the development of medical diagnostic technologies. The UK Life Sciences Industrial Strategy 2017 reported that Northern Ireland excels in Precision Medicine, advocating the sector for strategic development. However, the **2018 Steer Report** concluded that the regional LHS sector is currently disjointed and segregated, limiting its potential to enhance the region's prosperity. These are the specific challenges that NIPBT will address in order to transform NI into an internationally-leading region for precision medicine services and product development. These challenges will be addressed via three key objectives: **1\. Integration:** Create an R&D hub that seeds and fosters collaboration, synergies and innovation. **2\. Capacity Building:** Address key common gaps in scarce technology/expertise and further develop the region's existing, internationally-competitive research capabilities in core areas. **3\. Sustainability:** Deliver focused skills and career development networks, ensuring sustainable growth of the LHS sector leading to increased attractiveness of the region for foreign investment. To address these objectives, NIPBT will develop an industry-focused **Future Medicines Institute (FMI)** to drive commercially-relevant R&D; **a collaborative hub that will be the first in NI for this sector**. Combining cutting-edge health data analytics with state-of-the-art equipment/expertise, the FMI will be a vital catalyst for the regional LHS sector. NIPBT will capitalise on investment in the regional LHS sector already made by lnvestNI and lnnovateUK (e.g. Almac, Randox, PMCOE) and new capital investments financed under the Innovation Pillar of the **Belfast Region City Deal**; demonstrating clear alignment and synergy with the region's economic and health strategies. The result of this investment will be development of new platform technologies, diagnostics and therapeutics that will stimulate local economic growth, reverse the region's "brain- drain" and ultimately deliver innovative healthcare products and solutions to enhance patient outcomes locally and globally.

ACTIONED (integrAted moleCular soluTIons fOr diagNostics and Early Detection) in a consortium of three main partners: 1.National leading experts in genomics/tissue-based cancer diagnostics (The Precision Medicine Centre of Excellence at Queen's University Belfast or PMC) 2.The leading global provider of diagnostic solutions in cancer genomics and tissue diagnostics (Roche) 3.A UK SME with early success in artificial intelligence tools and related analytical frameworks (Sonrai Analytics) These partners have already worked together before, delivering products that routinely used in diagnostic laboratories in the NHS. The purpose of this ambitious partnership is to establish, in PMC's state-of-the-art accredited laboratory, all technology and software relating to genomics and tissue-based cancer diagnostics: a)Genomics, through a technology called Next Generation Sequencing, is the current main driver of personalised medicine to cancer patients. b)Digital Pathology and Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way we practice traditional pathology, delivering a degree of objectivity and quality-control unknown to date. Once established, the 3 parties will work on the integration necessary between these two pathways, impacting testing quality/affordability and clinical decision-making. ACTIONED will provide integration using colorectal cancer as an exemplar, a model to be applicable to all other cancer types, addressing two scenarios of critical unmet need. Firstly, accurate detection of early recurrence in stage II and III colorectal cancer patients, identifying those who will truly benefit from therapy from those who can be spared therapeutic toxicity. Secondly, detection of true early colorectal cancer, addressed as a proof-of-principle. ACTIONED will drive growth in our economy. Indeed, ACTIONED will be centered in Northern Ireland, providing an analytical/clinical product to be adopted by the NHS as a whole. This will enhance our position as leaders in development of healthcare knowledge and know-how integration at a global scale. Specifically: a) Sonrai Analytics will develop into a market position of great benefit b) PMC will become a strong reference laboratory for cancer studies globally. c) Roche will have a better value for its product. Finally, ACTIONED will deliver world-leading education through a very successful MSc currently run in Queen's University Belfast. Strategically, the PMC-Roche-Sonrai partnership within ACTIONED is an unprecedented coalition; 1. Roche's technological and sample commitment 2. Sonrai's capability to improve connectivity and integration between Roche platforms 3, PMC's fully integrated and accredited laboratory framework and strong molecular diagnostic know-how Together, ACTIONED will show the impact of this integration in our NHS, and improve the lives of our cancer patients.

"PathLEAD (**Path**ology data **L**akes, **E**ducation, **A**nalytics and **D**iscovery) is a consortium of nationally leading experts from the teaching hospitals of Coventry, Belfast, Nottingham and Oxford, their associated Universities and Philips, the commercial partner. We will develop computer aided diagnostics for testing of pathology samples. Specialist doctors (called pathologists) currently carry out testing via visual examination of pathology specimens under the microscope, a process that is inherently subjective. A large proportion of tissue samples examined are normal and using specialist pathologist time to establish this is expensive. We believe this can be done by computers, and valuable pathologist time saved and used elsewhere. Therefore we will develop a computer programme that will recognise normal tissue so that the sample does not need to examined by the pathologist. Furthermore we know that pathologists' performance is variable and in some cases limited, particularly where the tasks they perform are complex or require extensive experience. This can mean patients with some forms of breast and prostate cancer do not get the best treatment. Our computer programmes will assist the pathologist and improve these decisions. The development of these tools requires thousands of image files obtained from scanning microscope slides. This is time consuming to collect so once this data has been produced it is a valuable resource. We aim to make this available to other research teams, our commercial partner Philips and UK-based companies developing tools to improve healthcare. The result will be greater knowledge, improved tools and better care for the future. We recognise that patients have the right not to allow their data to be used for this purpose, and will be using the recently launched NHS National Data Opt Out scheme to record patients wishes accurately. Patients and lay representatives on our ethical and management committee will help decide how this data should be used. We expect that some tools will become successful commercially and plan to exploit this success re-investing some of the income back into the NHS to benefit patients. Our ability to provide high quality data, expertise, access to top-grade computer equipment and knowledge of commercialising these tools, will percolate to UK companies, building the economy in this sector and lead to the UK becoming a global leader. Our expertise will provide education to the pathology and computer science communities to share the knowledge gained, gaining in quality and efficiency, and having patients' benefit as our ultimate goal."