CPI To Build "Biologics Factory Of The Future"
By Lori Clapper
The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) announced on Thursday it will invest £20m to build what it calls a “Biologics Factory of the Future.” Tees Valley Unlimited Enterprise Partnership awarded half of the funding— £10m—for the project, which is expected to open in 2017.
Once complete, organizations will be allowed to use the new facility to develop and test medicine manufacturing technologies that can be “directly applied in the new and emerging stratified and personalized therapeutic supply chains,” according to CPI.
As part of a bigger plan to invest £379 million for job creation and economic growth, the hope is to attract new business as well as to drive innovation and make advances in the manufacturing sector.
The new building will be located in Central Park, Darlington, on the same site as CPI’s £38m National Biologics Manufacturing Center (NBMC) – currently under construction and due to be completed in 2015. Both will work hand-in-hand toward making advances in healthcare through biotechnology.
“The new facility will significantly increase the UK’s manufacturing capability in biologics, keeping us ahead in the global race and strengthening the UK’s position as the location of choice for life sciences companies,” Nigel Perry, CEO of CPI, said
Biotechnology is delivering significant advances in the pharmaceutical industry, revolutionizing the research and development, particularly in personalized treatments for specific diseases and patient groups. CPI reports that biological medicines currently make up 10 to 15 percent of the current pharmaceutical market. In fact, biotechnology is outperforming the market as a whole with one-fifth of new medicines being biotechnology-derived.
“If the UK is to lead and exploit the significant advances from the investment in biologics research made already, it will need to continue to develop its manufacturing processes,” Chris Dowle, director of biologics at CPI told the Gazette Live.
With the opening of both the Biologics Factory of the Future and the NBMC, CPI intends to empower the integration and simplification of process technologies, thus enabling production at a much smaller scale, with rapid change over between products.