In a report published today, the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP) has requested support from the government to build four new centres of excellence for medicines manufacturing across the UK.
UK medicines
This investment would lead to job creation for highly-skilled workers and would make the UK the premier place for the discovery, development and manufacture of new drugs.
‘Manufacturing Vision for UK Pharma’, sets out a plan for the government, revealing how the proposed centres of excellence will benefit the country by filling in the gaps in the UK’s manufacturing capabilities. Additionally, it describes how the government and industry can work together to build the country’s manufacturing sector with a roadmap.
The country’s business secretary has already laid out in the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund that investment of £197 million over 4 years has been set-aside to develop first-of-a-kind technologies for the manufacture of medicines.
“The UK is already one of the best places in the world to research and develop exciting new medicines for hard-to-treat diseases, but needs to improve when it comes to manufacturing and packaging them, ready to go to patients,” said Andy Evans, chair of the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP). “This new infrastructure is needed to ensure high-value jobs in manufacturing and packaging with know-how scales and grows here. From early-stage research and development to manufacturing and packaging, we want a coherent, joined up system so that patients will benefit when first-in-kind medicines are launched in the same place they are discovered.”