CPI Announce Investment into Biologics Factory of the Future

The Center for Process Innovation (CPI) has announced an investment of £20 million ($34 million) to create a Biologics Factory of the Future, £10 million ($17 million) of which is awarded by Tees Valley Unlimited Local Enterprise Partnership, as part of Local Growth Fund and their Growth Deal. Due to open in 2017, the new facility will allow organizations to develop and test medicine-manufacturing technologies that can be directly applied in the new personalized therapeutic supply chains.

The announcement comes as part of a £379 million ($645.8 million) investment into the region from the government’s flagship Local Growth Fund, which is designed to create jobs and ensure that every part of the country shares in economic growth. Located at Central Park, Darlington, the new facility will locate and integrate alongside CPI’s £38 million ($64.7 million) National Biologics Manufacturing Center, which is currently under construction on the same site and due for completion in 2015.

The provision of medicines to patients is changing from “one size fits all” to a personalized approach. This will have a significant impact on the established medicines supply chain, in that it is currently configured to deliver large batches of a single therapy to treat multiple patients with the same disease. DNA sequencing technologies are facilitating a more thorough understanding of causative mechanisms of diseases, enabling the differentiation of single diseases into multiple subtypes on the basis of underlying genetic factors. It is intended that CPI will enable the development of the process technologies and facility designs to deliver personalized medicines. It will achieve this through integration and simplification of process technologies to enable production at a much smaller scale and with change over between products.

CPI is the process industry element of the UK government’s national manufacturing strategy, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, a network of seven technology and innovation centers tasked with stimulating growth within key manufacturing sectors throughout the UK.

Source: Center for Process Innovation