Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious threat to human and animal health. The problem is multifactorial, spans across many disciplines and involves stakeholders from right across society's spectrum. Our belief is that by engaging researchers from different disciplines, we can ask new questions and develop new solutions to the AMR challenge. Scientists engaged in EPS can bring novel insights and innovative technologies to many aspects of the AMR challenge but there are barriers to their engagement with goal-orientated, inter-disciplinary research. We have identified the conditions that lead to successful inter-disciplinary research outcomes; receptiveness, understanding, communication, resources and networks. We have put together a programme of activities that will create the time and space for researchers from EPS to engage in thinking about the AMR challenge in such a way that they will be able to identify tractable problems that they can solve. To start with we will focus on areas of research excellence currently being conducted at the University of York that have not to date been applied to AMR research, but promise to provide new insights and innovative solutions. These areas are 'Novel tools for understanding and controlling bacterial behaviour' and 'Novel biosensors and diagnostics'. We recognize that a successful 'Bridging the Gap' programme will bring together collaborations between researchers not yet engaged with the AMR agenda and we have incorporated into our activities strategies to reach these people. The outcome will be an exciting community of inter-disciplinary researchers working on the challenges of AMR that are communicating, sparking ideas, writing papers and applying for further funding.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

We will research smart manufacturing routes, which impart controllable enhancement of properties and functionality of polymers and polymer composites whilst achieving precision geometry products. These will be relevant to a range of potential medical devices, selected with our industry partners, Zmith * Nephew, Wittman Battenfeld and Corbion Purac, particularly those exploiting shape memory functionality and surface feature control. The initial focus is for soft tissue fixation to bone (e.g. rotator cuff and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) repairs); longer-term goals include fixations for fracture (including intermedullary nails) and knee joint replacements. Solid phase orientation processing of polymers at temperatures above their glass transition point, but below their melting point, provides the major route to imparting a wide range of polymer molecular orientation, from low up to very high levels. This can be utilized to create dynamic devices which change shape in-situ on exposure to temperature or, potentially, body fluid, allowing the device to adapt to the surrounding bone topology. Protype devices will be manufactured from known resorbable or inert polymers, inorganic particles and suitable plasticisers all having known clinical history. The devices will be programmed to mechanically function and then degrade to expose known inorganic salts/scaffolds which can then be used to promote osteogenesis. In the case of medical implants such as tissue fixations, the recovery typically needs to take place at an appropriate temperature to avoid tissue damage (so less than ~50C), or (more challenging) be driven by exposure to body fluids, and to occur in an acceptable timescale to the operating clinicians (e.g. less than 15 s), and to retain fixation strength over required timescales (months for bioresorbables, permanent for non-resorbables). In addition to the solid phase orientation processing route, a range of melt processing techniques can be used to obtain (in general) lower levels of orientation but which may have other advantages in terms of manufacturing, including net shape processing. Novel variants of these are explored in the Research Programme,including: (a) micromoulding (single shot property gradient products, or over-moulded products, and surface feature control), (b) micro-extrusion (for precision preforms for die drawing, or controlled surface continuous products), and (c) hybrid processing, such as a novel injection-drawing process. Manufacturing challenges to be addressed include (i) the overall goal of 'Smart Manufacturing', defined here as the effective control of property levels through processing, simultaneous with achieving precision geometry products at economic production rates for shape memory polymers; (ii) materials and additives suitability, combined with processability for the complex requirements for bioresorbable fixations; (iii) formation of starting materials suited to manufacturing routes, and (iv) refined modelling for developed understanding of solid and melt phase processing, vital in developing understanding of the processes and process design.

Chronic wounds are those that fail to heal in an orderly and timely (typically three months) manner. Examples of chronic wounds include diabetic foot ulcers, pressure ulcers and venous leg ulcers. The incidence of chronic wounds is increasing as a result of lifestyle changes and the ageing population. For example, ~552 million people worldwide are estimated to have diabetes mellitus in 2030. Up to an estimated 25% of these patients will develop diabetic foot ulcers in their lifetime; half of these ulcers will be infected and 20% will undergo amputation of their lower limb. The annual economic impact of chronic wounds, which includes nursing time and dressing materials, on the global economy is estimated to be ~£20 billion by 2030. A common practise in wound management is to cover wounds with suitable dressings to facilitate the healing process. Standard dressings, however, do not provide insights into the status of the wound underneath. Thus, dressings are often changed to examine and assess the wound. This in turn hampers the process of normal wound healing and cause stress and pain to patients. The assessment process also consumes a significant amount of nursing time and dressing materials, which contributes to spiralling medical costs in wound care. In addition, current treatment methods do not use physical or chemical feedback to modify or adjust the treatment based on wound's condition, and hence have limited success. It has been proposed to embed sensors in dressings to enable clinicians and nurses to make effective diagnostic and therapeutic wound management decisions without changing wound dressings; therefore improving patient comfort. Existing sensors, however, do not satisfy the operational (e.g. sensitivity, specificity) and physical (e.g. flexibility) characteristics required for embedding them in dressings. This project will develop a sensor system to overcome these limitations. The proposed sensor system will consist of a small laser that will emit light of different colour based on the concentration of a biomarker of interest in the fluid interface at the wound surface. The change in the colour of emitted light will be measured by waving a mobile device (e.g. phone, tablet) over the dressing containing the sensor system. The captured data will be transmitted to healthcare professionals, processed, stored to keep a record of wound history, and used for diagnostics and therapeutics. The proposed project will benefit patients by effective diagnostics and treatment of chronic wounds. The information on wound condition will permit timely identification of hard to heal wounds and will also be used to create a feedback loop for fully optimised treatments tailored to individual patients. For example, the rate of release of anti-inflammatory drugs will be tailored based on wound condition. This is critical in terms of chronic wound management, where it has been shown that the longer the delay in administering appropriate treatment, the more difficult a wound is to heal.

Polymers, because of their properties and ease of processing into complex shapes are among the most important materials available to us today and the polymer industry makes a major contribution to the UK economy (18 billion per year). An exciting new family of materials are polymer nanocomposites (NCs), in which particles with nanoscale dimensions are dispersed in the polymer. The benefits of NCs derive primarily from the exceptionally large amounts of particle surface area that can be achieved for a small addition of particles (e.g. 5% by weight). Thus they offer dramatic improvement in material performance with significant increases in mechanical and gas barrier properties. The user of such a material therefore gets a more effective product (or one containing less material for the same effectiveness). It is well recognised that the nanoparticle-polymer interface/chemistry is a critical parameter in determining the degree of dispersion of particles in a nanocomposite and that the interfacial properties have a significant influence on nanocomposite performance. In recent times, however it has become apparent that the processing route by which the nanoparticle-polymer mixture is formed into a final product is an equally important aspect of NC manufacture and this is the area on which we will focus in this proposal.The principal aim of the proposed project is therefore to achieve a fundamental understanding of the interactions between material formulation, processing and properties of polymer nanocomposites and to apply this to the development of proof of concept applications which provide generic processing information for industry and academia alike. The work will include statistically designed experimental studies using pilot scale polymer processing equipment and validation trials on industrial scale equipment. Parameters to be studied include extruder shear and temperature profiles, screw design, additives such as anti-oxidant, post extrusion deformation such as biaxial extension and cooling rates. We will characterise the materials in terms of structure, mechanical, thermal and barrier performance in order to link process to structure and structure to performance.We will utilise the combined processing, characterisation and analytical skills and facilities existing in Queen's University Belfast (QUB) and the University of Bradford (UoB), partners who have worked together successfully on large collaborative projects, in the past and currently, and have an excellent national and international track record in polymer processing research.