Matter PR recently carried out a global media campaign to launch a new national institute and announce Government funding for a series of ambitious technology projects that will transform the way medicines are discovered, enabling the pharmaceutical industry to develop groundbreaking drugs faster, cheaper, and better than ever before.

These projects are the first wave of major initiatives for the £103m Rosalind Franklin Institute being built at the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire. Matter PR worked closely with the RFI and key partners such as EPSRC, Harwell, and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, to deliver an integrated PR campaign. We developed three strong stories for the media:

•  The World’s most advanced real-time video camera, the key to a new technique that uses light and sound to eradicate some of the most lethal forms of cancer.
•  A new project pioneering fully-automated hands-free molecular discovery to produce new drugs up to ten times faster and transform the UK’s pharmaceutical industry.
•  A ground-breaking new UK facility that will revolutionise the way samples are produced and harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate new drugs for clinical testing within a few weeks.

The media relations campaign generated over 70 pieces of media coverage with a total audience reach of 7.5 million including articles in Digital Trends, Chemistry World, and Pharma Times.

As well as a traditional media campaign, Matter PR also worked with filmmaker and director James Harrison to produce a promotional launch film for social media that explained the inspiration behind the RFI and some of its key themes.

We produced a series of short video news releases about the new RFI projects announced which generated thousands of views on Vimeo and Youtube, went viral on social media, and generated more online news coverage through sites which used the video as a news story.

The Institute will harness disruptive new technologies such as AI and robotics to dramatically improve our understanding of biology, leading to new diagnostics, new drugs, and new treatments for millions of patients Worldwide.

Backed by over £100 million of investment, the Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI) will be a national centre of excellence in technology development and innovation. Physical scientists, engineers and life scientists will work together to develop new techniques and instrumentation and apply them to key challenges in the health and life sciences – leading to improved understanding of disease, faster discovery of new treatments for chronic conditions that affect millions of people worldwide, new jobs, and long-term economic growth.

The namesake of the institute, the pioneering X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, was one of the key figures in the discovery of the structure of DNA, and used a technique with roots in physics and technology to transform life science. The Institute will follow in this spirit, developing unique new techniques and tools and applying them for the first time to biological problems.