It is important to achieve the best outcomes from public sector investments in medical research. To do this, research funders need to understand where they should invest the limited funds they have available to maximise the outcomes from that investment. One consideration when deciding where to allocate funding is whether there are economies of scope and scale in biomedical research. Economies of scope are said to exist when undertaking two different activities in the same place is better value for money than undertaking the same two activities separately, e.g. teaching medicine in the same place as researching it. Economies of scale exist when the cost to do or produce something falls the greater the quantity produced in one place, e.g. the cost per MRI scan falls as the proportion of time a scanner is in use increases. In the context of public funding of medical research, where the research outputs will differ between projects and researchers, the concept of economies of scope is perhaps most relevant. If there are economies of scope or scale, then medical research funding would have greater impact when concentrated in a few locations. Conversely, if there are diseconomies of scope or scale then funding would be more productive if spread across numerous research units rather than being concentrated in a few. If there are no great economies or diseconomies, then research outputs per investment would be unaffected by the number of units that funding is spread across. Economies of scale and scope in biomedical research could come from two main sources. It could result from the physical infrastructure, such as expensive research equipment, or other support services, which can be provided more cost effectively where a large group of people are working together. Or it could result from the interactions between researchers, enabling them to work together better and draw on advice from colleagues. However, new technologies are making both the sharing of infrastructure, and long distance communication, easier so may mean that these effects are decreasing in importance. Current evidence is inconclusive on whether there are economies of scope and scale and if so, what causes them. Therefore, this project aims to address three main questions: 1.Do economies of scope and scale exist in medical research: is it better to support research in a few places rather than spread support across many places? 2.What is the source of any economies of scope and scale: use of costly and specific infrastructure, or interactions affected by location? 3.Where and if benefits (or dis-benefits) exist as a result of colocation in terms of the interactions facilitated, how do these differ between different researchers (early career and later career, basic and clinical, different research areas etc.), research stages and how have they changed over time (if at all)? We will do this in three stages: 1. A thorough, rapid evidence review of the work that has already been done on this subject; 2. Interviews with researchers across a range of locations, and detailed study of a few specific locations where researchers have recently moved into new research centres to understand the effect of their new environment on their research and the way they work together; 3. Development of an econometric model (or models) for economies of scope and scale, and investigation of whether the necessary data is available to test them. The project would make three contributions. First it will compile the existing evidence into a form that can be understood and used by policy makers, and disseminate that to them. Second it will develop new insights into the ways in which any economies of scope and scale function within biomedical research through the interviews and detailed analysis of specific locations. Third it would explore the feasibility of carrying out an econometric examination of the magnitude of the issue in the UK biomedical research context.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Getting benefits from medical research in terms of preventing or treating illness, advancing scientific knowledge and generating economic wealth often, though not always, involves private industry. The private sector builds on and interacts with public and charity funded research and researchers; it conducts its own further research, develops and commercialises medicines and other technologies for use in health care. Theoretical and applied analyses so far published imply that public/charity funded medical research and private sector R&D are complements: extra spending on medical research stimulates extra private sector investment in R&D. But the only attempts to measure this complementarity so far have used US data and are somewhat out of date. RAND Europe and the OHE therefore propose to develop the methodology for estimating how many £s of pharmaceutical industry R&D are stimulated by an extra £ of public or charity funded medical research. We will improve on the econometric analysis used in the earlier US studies and create a UK, and up to date, dataset of public, charity and private pharmaceutical industry research spending in the UK, disaggregated into therapeutic areas. Time series data are available for total UK pharmaceutical industry R&D spending, but not broken down by therapeutic area. So we will construct estimated splits of spending by therapeutic area on the basis of two different proxies. First, we will use bibliometric analysis of peer reviewed research articles that have private sector authors based in the UK to estimate the relative weights given by the UK industry to different disease areas in its research. The necessary bibliometric database is available and permits analysis for each year from 1981 onwards. Second we will undertake a corresponding analysis of patents by therapeutic area, where that is evident, by year. To allow for likely differences between companies in their willingness to publish and their desire to patent, and given that different companies may focus on different therapeutic areas, we will explore the development of indices of companies' propensity to publish and propensity to patent. The indices will then be used to weight the publications and patents produced by those companies when using those data to proxy the split of pharmaceutical industry R&D spending. We will test the reasonableness of the proxies we develop for splitting total UK pharmaceutical industry R&D spend by therapeutic area via interviews with 12 senior company R&D managers in the UK (from the UK leading R&D companies), who will also be asked about the likelihood of, and the factors affecting, feedback from company R&D influencing public/charity research agendas. We will improve on analyses to date by separately analysing publicly funded medical research and charity funded medical research, not merely aggregating the two. We will also attempt to determine whether there is a measurable impact in the reverse direction, i.e. whether greater private pharmaceutical R&D investment stimulates greater charity or public medical research spending in similar areas.

The proliferation and illicit movement of firearms and explosives within and around Europe is a complex of interrelated problems. The wave of terrorist attacks that characterized 2015, including Paris terror attacks in November 2015 and recent event in Brussels, provide mounting evidence to suggest that the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons (including their parts, components and accessories), ammunition and explosives is an existential threat to security and public safety in Europe. The security of Europe against this type of threat is further complicated by the Schengen Agreement that removes international borders between its member states thereby enabling passport-free movement, creates increased challenges to detecting illicit weapons and apprehending traffickers and illicit owners, especially when travelling by land. The European Union has clear and tough firearm laws, including a general ban on the civilian sale of automatic rifles (European Union, 2008). The legal sale and ownership of firearms, which aims to minimise gun violence and gun-related crime, is mapped in the European Commission's 2013 report "Firearms and the internal security of the EU: protecting citizens and disrupting illegal trafficking". Nevertheless, the spread of firearms from the Western Balkans has been tracked by the Small Arms Survey, where they claim a strong link exists between crime and firearms proliferation into surrounding regions, although little data exists to support this assertion (Carapic, 2014). Despite the clear and strong regulation of firearms, there are multiple avenues for entrepreneurial criminal actors to bypass controls and traffic weapons through Europe. One possible avenue is via the dark net as noted by the European Commission's report which gives voice to fears of firearm parts and components being traded online and delivered through mail order, or express delivery services (European Commission, 2013). Entrepreneurial criminal networks and so-called 'lone-wolves' therefore have the opportunity to conduct illegal activities in cyberspace, enabling a different form of transnational crime already exploited, for example, for drugs trafficking (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014; Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016). This project explores the European illegal arms trade and focuses on the role played by the dark-net in fuelling and/or facilitating such trade. The overarching research question this project seeks to answer is the following: what can the investigation of the dark-net reveal about the illegal arms trade in Europe? In answering this question, the project will: 1) Provide an evidence-based assessment of the nature and scale of the online illegal supply and trade (i.e. transactions) of small arms and light weapons (including their parts, components and accessories), ammunition and explosives. 2) Identify potential loopholes in European and National firearms laws and regulations that may be exploited by online traffickers (e.g. discrepancies in the definitions of what can and cannot be legally sold). 3) Generate policy recommendations, contributing to a more efficient and effective action against arms trafficking in Europe. 4) Contribute to the ongoing academic research in the field of crypto-markets/DNMs

Research Councils "encourage researchers to consider the potential contribution that their research can make to the economy and society from the outset, and the resources required to carry out appropriate and project specific knowledge exchange impact activities". As part of their funding applications, researchers must submit a 'Pathway to Impact' section which is peer reviewed by referees and panel members. Similarly the Funding Council will be assessing impact using a case study approach as part of the Research Excellence Framework. Case studies will be reviewed by academic peers and non-academic experts providing a private, public and third sector perspective. However, in assessing the adequacy/quality of these impact claims reviewers cannot currently draw on comprehensive evidence of the views of beneficiaries (i.e. the general population) or the producers of research (i.e. biomedical and health researchers) to qualify or justify their recommendations. It remains unclear how beneficiaries value research impact, how such values vary across different groups and more fundamentally if the UK population understands research impact. In the absence of knowledge about - and methods for assessing - values of beneficiaries and funders of research, policy that directs researchers to estimate impact and research funders to value such impacts rests on weak empiric foundations. This study aims to address this gap by refining and adapting a survey-based approach known as Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) to analyse the relative valuations of research impact as perceived by the general population and researchers. This study will focus on biomedical and health research and will contribute to the MRC's objective to fund studies that "Deliver user/beneficiary views on the contribution of academic research and MRC input to this". The proposed study comprises 5 phases: - Desk and qualitative research in the identification and classification of impacts. A thorough desk based review will catalogue various types of impacts and models for classifying them. We will then refine and develop this classification in four focus groups with the general public and 24 interviews with biomedical and health researchers. The output of this phase will be a conceptual framework with different types of biomedical and health related impact and different intensities of each impact category for use in the BWS survey. - Development of quantitative survey. Based on the first phase we will design and test a survey instrument to elicit relative ranks of different types of impact. The questionnaire will be tested through cognitive interviews and the full fieldwork procedures through a pilot with the public and researchers. The output of this phase will be the final survey instrument. - Fieldwork with researchers and the general public. We will use an online panel to survey 1000 members of the public and the list of existing MRC grantholders to survey 500 health and biomedical scientists. The output of this phase will be a dataset for analysis. - Analysis of researcher and public preferences. The analysis will involve two steps. First we will conduct a review and exploratory statistical analysis to identify associations and trends that require consideration in the modelling work. This would include sample composition across key socioeconomic and demographic variables and checking respondents' understanding of the survey (whether they were able to respond to the questions). Second we will develop a BWS model to (i) derive a full ranking of the impact statements by the general public and health and biomedical scientists, and (ii) explore the extent to which preferences are consistent across the two stakeholder groups. The output of this phase will be the study's main findings. - Reporting and dissemination. Findings will be widely disseminated to policy and research communities using a number of channels, including peer reviewed publications, policy briefs and videos.