A NORTH-EAST centre of excellence has secured a Government cash injection to support the manufacture of new medicines.

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) led a consortium of six companies, including UCB Celltech, Lonza Biologics, and Newcastle-based Alcyomics, that has been handed a £6.2m investment via the Government’s Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative.

CPI's role in the project will be to supply technical expertise, facilities, and project management through its soon-to-open £38m National Biologics Manufacturing Centre based at Darlington.

The investment will go towards the estimated £11.3m total cost of the project, which aims to significantly improve the current biologics supply chain and enable the continued delivery of cost effective therapies to patients. Additionally, the project proposes to create 23 new jobs - 10 of them in the North-East - and safeguard 174 existing positions by March 2022.

Biologics are medicines based on biological sources, such as antibodies that are used to destroy cancer cells, and vaccines to fight infectious conditions such as flu and Ebola.

The intended outcome of the project is to reduce the time it takes to bring biologics to market by making it easier to weed out at an earlier stage those drugs that are likely to fail due to safety, manufacturing or formulation difficulties.

Dr Chris Dowle, director of Biologics at CPI said “We are delighted to have received the government’s support on this project. The consortium of companies behind this project is well-equipped to streamline the development process of biologics. The increasing emphasis on stratified medicines means that supply chains that were initially designed to deliver a few traditional blockbusters in large quantities must be adapted to develop and manufacture a higher number of diverse therapies. Our goal is to find innovative ways to make this transition while also ensuring affordability.”

The Darlington biologics centre is expected to start work in the summer.