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Mike Hughes talks to Philip Probert, Director for CPI’s Darlington and Glasgow operations
At the Centre for Process Innovation’s Darlington site, remarkable and groundbreaking work is rarely visible to the people who may eventually benefit from it.
A university team may discover a promising sequence, or a biotech business has an idea that works on a laboratory bench. Perhaps a pharmaceutical company needs to understand how to make a treatment reliably, affordably and at scale – an implausibly challenging combination of science, engineering, regulation, equipment and capital.
This is CPI territory.
It is an unusual role, in that the Centre is not there to discover medicines in the first place, it does not sell them to the NHS or patients at the other end and it does not take ownership of the intellectual property that arrives at its door.
Its value is in helping others cross the divide between idea and commercial reality.
That makes it one of the more consequential institutions in the North East business landscape, even if it is not always one of the most conspicuous. Its work has a bearing on the products that grow from university spin-outs, the capacity of businesses to commercialise new technologies, the region’s ability to retain scientific talent and the UK’s preparedness for the next health emergency.
Philip Probert, Director for CPI’s Darlington and Glasgow operations, is clear about the organisation’s place in the chain. His responsibility covers biologics, RNA, oligonucleotide and peptides, and manufacturing capability, encompassing development, scale-up and early-phase manufacture of pharmaceutical products. In plain terms, CPI takes processes which may have been demonstrated in a flask in a laboratory and helps turn them into something that can be made consistently at much larger scale.
‘There are companies all the time who might be at different stages of medicine development,’ he tells me in the smart and airy CPI building on Central Park, just a few steps from the town’s proposed new STEM Centre.
‘It might be that they’ve just identified a particular sequence that needs to be scaled up. It could be for cancer, it could be for an autoimmune disease, it could be for all sorts of different indications.
‘Whatever comes through our doors, most of what we do is about supporting those customers, giving the expertise and access to equipment, and the advice to help them to take their process that might fit in a glass now and scale it to something that’s suddenly in a tank that’s 100 times, 10,000 times the scale.
‘The people who come to us may have done some interesting research at university and they’ve discovered a real opportunity for a particular product, but how do they make it a scale that the market demands?
‘Universities are a good example, because when they spin out, they protect the IP. But the skills to discover medicine are very different to the skills to scale up and manufacture medicine – and they don’t have the kit, so they hit a barrier.
‘That’s why we often describe CPI as the bridge between the idea and the commercial product. Imagine we’re making cars. What we do here is help an organisation who have made it by hand in a garage. We’d then develop a process that says this is how you would make that car in a factory – but we’re still not the factory.
‘We’ll tell them about the automation to use, this is how you’re going to bolt it together, and here’s the manual that says how you’re going to do it. What we then do is give that manual to a commercial manufacturing company.’
CPI was established in 2004 by One NorthEast, the former regional development agency, as part of a wider effort to build on the North East’s industrial knowledge and create a platform for future innovation. It was one of five centres of excellence intended to help the region compete through process industries, life sciences, digital technology, nanotechnology, photonics and renewables.
The organisation emerged from a region long shaped by heavy industry, chemical processing, engineering and manufacturing, that was looking for ways to translate that past into a new future. So CPI’s original task was not simply to conduct research, but to offer companies access to specialist people, facilities and expertise that would otherwise sit beyond the means of many smaller businesses.
That mission has evolved as the technologies have changed. In 2011 CPI became a founding member of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, the UK network established to accelerate commercialisation of innovative products and processes. Over two decades, it has expanded to work across areas including pharmaceuticals, health technologies, materials, energy storage and food and agriculture.
Philip joined CPI as a scientist in 2017, became responsible for its technical team and was at the organisation during Covid. When he joined, CPI didn’t really do molecular biology because it had limited capabilities. So some of the first work he was involved with was bringing in some of the kit that it needed if it wanted to fulfil what he knew were wider ambitions.
That investment proved significant when the pandemic arrived. RNA-based technologies moved rapidly from a specialist field to a central component of the global vaccine response. CPI had begun building foundations before the crisis, and Philip says that gave it a position from which it could move much faster once the need became immediate.
‘We were in a strong position in terms of pick-up,’ he says.
‘It was a new type of product, but with the foundations in place it was just a different application, so we were always going to be able to move at pace.’
CPI’s work during and after Covid sharpened its capabilities as a collaborator in a wider innovation and manufacturing ecosystem. It developed processes, built technical capacity, strengthened relationships and gained experience which took it beyond a single response.
‘Prior to the last pandemic, we didn’t have a licensed GMP manufacturing site (Good Manufacturing Practice, a system of strict quality standards) across the road. We didn’t have the experience with RNA technology that we currently have, and technology was at a different point,’ he says.
‘There may always be challenges around the response generally, but certainly in terms of our ability within the UK, with this particular technology, we’re in a better position because of what we’ve done, the investment we’ve put in, and the skills we’ve built in the region.’
The position it occupies at the centre of the process allows CPI to engage earlier than many contract development and manufacturing organisations, he argues.
‘CPI is unusual both domestically but also internationally. There are companies in the UK, contract development and manufacturing companies, who can go further. They can do later stage development, and full scale manufacturing.
‘We are unusual in that we will engage customers generally earlier, and because of how we operate, our IP position, and the flexibility to enable companies beyond working with us, within the UK, there’s no one else like us in the technologies that we support
‘The only challenge for us is if a company is successful and they’ve managed to cross that bridge, they don’t need to come back across that bridge again for the same product,’ he says.
‘Success for us might be a goal for a partner to become a large company and suddenly they’re able to do it all themselves but they will still have told their friends and other companies that CPI did a great job for them, and because the market isn’t very big and word of mouth is key our reputation goes up, and that is fundamental for further progress.’
Philip notes that insulin, one of the earliest biologic products, is still broadly made in cells, in large tanks, with stirring and gas lines, showing that a certain production logic has endured. The major advances have been in the speed and efficiency with which companies can develop and refine those processes.
He tells me: ‘We can bring timelines down from months or years to weeks. We can do lots simultaneously at smaller volumes, so an ability to scale-down is as vital as scaling up.
‘We can work with increasingly small volumes, moving from litres to millilitres and down to microlitres. Robotics and automation can take on repetitive elements of expression, purification and analytical development, while advances in fluidics, machine learning and analytical technologies allow us to generate and interpret data earlier.’
He points out that there is another reason to make medicines more efficiently. Not every treatment will serve a vast patient population. If the only viable way to manufacture a drug is at massive volume, a therapy for a smaller group may struggle to make commercial sense, regardless of its clinical potential.
‘If every medicine you make has to go to a massive scale-up facility, it’s going to be expensive. But if you’ve only got a smaller population of patients who need a particular drug, it might mean that if you can’t be very clever with how you manufacture it, you can’t get access to those drugs.
‘You might have a condition that’s very treatable, but there isn’t the economic incentive.’
That objective points towards one of the most ambitious areas in which CPI sees opportunity – mass personalisation of medicine, moving from treatments designed for broad patient populations towards therapies informed by DNA and the precise characteristics of an individual’s disease.
‘There are personalised products now that are cell-based,’ he says.
‘There’s something called CAR T therapies (chimeric antigen receptor T‑cell) where you take blood cells out of a patient on an individual basis and you edit them and reintroduce them. That’s really exciting medicine, but it’s difficult to scale because you have to get cells from patients and cells are hard to culture.
‘Mass personalisation is working with the DNA where you can take a sample, sequence it, understand what it is and then you can develop a specific medicine for that, which might be an mRNA medicine, for example. The challenge at the moment is it’s too expensive and takes too long. These things do exist, but probably in the short term they’ll be second, third or fourth line treatments. I want these things to be first line.’
To move towards that goal, CPI’s work depends on people who can operate between disciplines: scientists who understand biology and chemistry, engineers who can translate processes into industrial systems, and people equipped to work with increasingly digital and data-rich technologies.
The problem is not simply getting more young people interested in science – there seems to be a reassuringly large amount of them keen to progress – it is making sure the pipeline runs from education through into regional employment.
‘It’s called a skills pipeline for a reason
because there are two ends of the pipe,’ says Philip. ‘One end is education, the other is a job here in the region.’
‘But at the moment the pipe’s leaky and we lose talent from the region. There is a challenge around increasing the size of pipe going in because it’s not enough to train more in science or engineering, we need more training available on how to apply it.’
‘I can empathise with making those big choices – I chose biology over engineering while considering A-levels and university, despite a family background in engineering and mathematics. I then went on to take a degree, Masters and PhD, then worked in academia.
‘But I wanted a closer connection to real-world impact, to feel a more tangible effect on people or companies.’
He hopes that young people making these key life decisions will find the same perfect combination in CPI that he did – a setting in which science and engineering could come together, while projects had immediate commercial milestones and consequences.
‘What we are doing is a hybrid of science and engineering, so I get to deploy all the things I enjoy in a single role.
‘Right now, we have around 40 live projects, from SMEs to biotechs to pharma companies, private funding, public funding, national, international. All those customers have their own milestones, their own aspirations, their own pressures, all of which this next generation of staff can share with them.’
CPI has a recognised route for apprentices and graduates who share that level of ambition to move through the business into specialist and leadership roles, but the challenge remains of retaining people in this region.
‘The gravity of jobs is down south,’ he says,
‘You can fight that gravity, but it creates a real challenge for both recruitment and retention.
‘We put a huge amount into developing people and building their skills, and ultimately I want people to have great careers. It’s fantastic when someone we’ve developed goes on to do something brilliant, but of course we’d also like to create enough opportunity here that talented people can continue to develop their careers in the region.’
Philip is not from the North East, but his wife is from Darlington, and CPI is the reason he built his career in the region.
‘If it wasn’t for CPI, I’d be working down south or overseas,’ he admits.
‘I have kids and I want them to be able to choose to work in the North. Right now there simply aren’t enough jobs so they may have to move, depending on what they decide to do.
‘I want my kids to be able to choose to stay close to me. But I’ve got an opportunity to support that through what we do here, what we do in the region. So I’m not powerless, and we’ve got great universities and the incoming STEM Centre will bring people closer to where we’re doing translational science.’
He sits on a steering group for Central Park where the new centre will be based alongside Business Central housing the smaller potential partners, Teesside University with its expertise, spinouts and National Horizons Centre, Innovation Central, home to the Northern Endurance Partnership and lead partner Darlington College.
‘For us, it’s very positive,’ he says. ‘I’m very passionate about this site, this location because it is a real opportunity for Darlington. To nurture talent, to see people develop and be successful.
‘The STEM Centre is exciting to be engaged with, to work with young talent. It’s exciting working with teenagers and graduates so full of energy and possibilities and to hopefully get them involved in what we do, and I come back to impact – medicines change lives. What’s more impactful than helping save people’s lives? It’s getting people to get excited about what we’re excited about.
‘But we need more of this sort of investment in the region so we can create more,’ he says. ‘We also need the money to be here, because with money you’ll retain talent.’
CPI itself is supported through three revenue streams: core grant funding connected with its role in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, competitive grant-funded work, and commercial contracts with customers. Its public backing is important because it enables an operating model that commercial providers alone may not supply.
‘We receive a generous grant which ultimately ties back to UK government, that enables us to have the model that we have and the breadth of capabilities. If we want companies to be based here, we have to make it easy for them to scale up and commercialise. If they get successful, they’ll pull in more money that’s going to help create more jobs and investment in the UK economy.
‘But we need to put money in at all the right stages because you’re not going to put money in and get results in six months. Only by having that consistent plan over five, ten or twenty years, with the right people and the best technology, can you build that whole ecosystem.
‘What we have at Central Park now feels increasingly joined up, so the challenge is to grow it further. There are remarkable organisations here, but still not as many organisations as we would like.’
His modest wish for a café at the site says so much more than just beans. It is about the chance encounters and informal conversations from which new ideas can emerge.
‘If you don’t meet each other, it doesn’t happen.’
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At the heart of that sort of community, CPI is precisely the kind of institution a region needs if it is serious about building the businesses, skills and industrial capacity – it was formed in the North East to create that kind of platform. Twenty-two years later, it is applying the original idea to some of the most demanding questions in medicine and manufacturing.
‘There’s never a dull day,’ he says.
‘There are always new challenges. The opportunity of working in the innovation space is difficult, but that’s what makes it exciting. If it was easy, someone else would have done it.’
The passion he clearly has for a subject that is so personal, so precise and yet potentially so transformational is a key part of the respect and authority CPI has built up from day one. Partners don’t just want the tech and the skill levels, they want drive and ambition, confidence and ingenuity that surpasses what they had found before.
That is the CPI formula.
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