Scottish innovation centre revolutionising pharma manufacturing
Ageing populations, combined with the rising costs of drugs, and the need for more personalised treatments are all putting significant strain on our healthcare system.
However, in order to address these challenges, the pharmaceutical industry needs to adapt.
The Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, a ground-breaking collaboration, seeks to provide solutions.
This consortium – made up of government, industry and academic partners across the UK – is enabling the adoption of innovative, next-generation, technologies into the pharmaceutical industry.
With goals such as improving efficiencies in the production of medicines, relieving financial burdens on the healthcare system, and improving patient access to effective treatments, this collaboration has the potential to revolutionise medicines manufacturing.
Unique partnership model
What makes the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre stand out is its remarkable partnership model.
A collaboration between CPI, the University of Strathclyde and founding industry partners, GSK and AstraZeneca, the consortium has created a network of leading healthcare experts from across industry, academia and government.
Ultimately, this facilitates a unique environment, allowing for a collective multi-disciplinary effort to address industry challenges rapidly, while enabling partners to get involved in evaluating, testing and prototyping technologies before they progress to commercial-scale manufacture. Partners mutually benefit by having access to innovations in a pre-competitive setting, much more cost-efficiently and at a lower risk.
Multi-million-pound mission
The centre is supported by £35 million of government funding, with £20 million from UK Research & Investment and £15 million from Scottish Enterprise.
Alongside private industry support from AstraZeneca and GSK, this project will enable access to the global life sciences market, worth £98 billion.
Identifying the barriers
To begin tackling industry challenges, two grand challenges – industrial hurdles inhibiting progress to be made from current manufacturing processes – were identified by the centre.
The first involves the creation of a continuous direct compression (CDC) platform that will enable oral solid dosage medicines (such as tablets) to be produced more robustly and efficiently. When compared with traditional ‘batch’ manufacturing processes (where single batches of medicines are manufactured at a time), ‘continuous’ manufacturing (the flow of production without interruption) can enable greater process control along with a more efficient use of time and expensive materials.
Overall, this project has the potential to allow pharmaceutical companies to develop the right recipe and its production route faster and at a reduced cost – which could benefit patients as well as the industry as a whole.
The second grand challenge will deliver ‘just in time’ supply of drugs to patients in clinical trials through the development of an innovative, automated supply chain platform.
Current manufacturing processes for clinical trial can be wasteful as there is a lot of uncertainty that the clinical trial process has to account for. By automating the packaging and labelling process, the industry can be more flexible against this uncertainty, and customise products late in the supply process for specific patients, therefore reducing waste.
This platform (called PACE, which stands for Pharmacy Automation for Clinical Efficiency), enables the production of multiple products on a single line, and minimises waste, risk and cost, while maximising speed to patient, improving access to new medicines.
New partners
To help fulfil these grand challenges, the centre has been recruiting additional partners.
In August and September, four new partners – Applied Materials, Siemens, Perceptive Engineering LTD and Process Systems Enterprise LTD – joined the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre. These companies will all provide expertise to enable the automation and digitalisation of pharmaceutical manufacturing processes within these grand challenges.
With a plan to introduce two new grand challenges every 18 months, the centre will continue to introduce new partners to support its ambitious and disruptive projects.
Ground-breaking underway
Construction for the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre’s world-class state-of-art facility in Renfrewshire has officially commenced, with a ground-breaking ceremony held at the end of October.
This ‘first-of-its-kind’ facility will open its doors in early 2022, providing a unique space for partners and collaborators to work on the centre’s current, and future, grand challenges.
By addressing current challenges while easing the development and adoption of innovative technologies into this sector, the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre is transforming pharmaceutical manufacturing processes.
Along with the potential to improve patient outcomes, this centre is undoubtedly a valuable asset to the pharmaceutical industry and economy, helping to secure Scotland, and the UK as a whole, as a world-leading innovator.
Discover more at www.uk-cpi.com/mmic