Northeast England gets $34 million investment to fund biotechnology facility

The Centre for Process Innovation has announced investment of £20 million ($34 million) to fund a ‘Biologics Factory of the Future’ in the UK.

Half of this is awarded by Tees Valley Unlimited Local Enterprise Partnership as part of the local growth fund. The new facility is due to open in 2017 in Central Park, Darlington in the Teeside area of Northeast England, alongside the CPI’s National Biologics Manufacturing Centre due for completion in 2015. It will allow organizations to develop and test manufacturing technologies, which can be directly applied in therapeutic supply chains.

The Tees Valley Local Enterprise Partnership, along with the UK government, has identified personalized medicine as being of strategic importance to the UK, taking over from a ‘one size fits all’ approach. The facility will change the way the supply chain system currently works, where it is configured to deliver large batches of a single therapy to treat multiple patients with the same disease.