The Government has announced that The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) will establish and manage a new £38m centre to encourage innovative solutions in the UK healthcare market.
The new National Biologics Industrial Innovation Centre (NBIIC) will be a large open access facility that will assist companies of all sizes in the proving and scaling-up of processes to manufacture new biologic medicines such as antibodies and vaccines.
The centre is part of the Government’s ‘Strategy for UK Life Sciences’ launched in 2011 to strengthen the UK’s life-science sector.
Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, said the Government’s investment would help “the UK to remain a location of choice for investment in an increasingly competitive and globalised health life-sciences sector…The new centre sends a clear message to the world that we are creating the best environment to invent and manufacture biologic medicines and continue to be a world leader in life sciences”
The NBIIC will support the commercialisation of research by promoting collaboration between academia, the National Health Service and industry.
CPI is the UK innovation centre serving the process industries. It is part of the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult and in its 9 year history has created National Centres in Printable Electronics, Industrial Biotechnology and Anaerobic Digestion.
CPI works with industry, academia and the public sector to scale-up and prove the next generation of products and processes. It does this by bringing the manufacturing skills of its people together with leading edge capital assets in collaborative innovation partnerships.
Dr Chris Dowle, Director of Sustainable Processing at CPI, said: “The National Biologics Industry Innovation Centre (NBIIC) will build upon the UK’s excellent research base with its strong pipeline of new potential biopharmaceutical products to help deliver a leading UK industry in bio-manufacturing. In this rapidly growing global marketplace, innovation in manufacturing will be vital to UK success and this will be a primary focus for the NBIIC.”
