Health Innovation North West Coast is a partner in a £5m project to make Liverpool a global leader in biologics
A new project, led by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), will enable the seamless translation of innovative vaccine and drug research into new medicines that will prevent disease, save lives and boost the regional economy.
BRITE (Biologics Regional Innovation and Technology Ecosystem), is a cross-sector partnership, which includes Liverpool city region universities, industry, and other health and life science organisations, such as Health Innovation North West Coast, has been awarded a combined, nearly £5million by Research England’s University Commercialisation Ecosystem fund to develop essential capacity to grow the regional and national biologics ecosystem, addressing challenges in their manufacture and commercial scale-up.
The UK is renowned for its biologics expertise, but gaps remain in infrastructure to turn world-class academic discoveries into new medicines as they require sophisticated manufacturing processes and advanced facilities for the development and scale-up into clinical trials and delivery for patients.
Helping to plug these gaps will be Health Innovation North West Coast, who, along with the other partners, will focus on breaking down barriers, and building and coalescing the commercialisation ecosystem, ensuring that biologics assets developed in Liverpool are commercialised locally.
Mike Kenny, Associate Director of Innovation and Industry Partnerships, said: “We've all got pipelines of innovations that are separate, and, if they're separate, we can't leverage all of the assets within those pipelines. A lot of the work that we'll be doing is to create a unified BRITE pipeline for the Liverpool city region that brings all of those innovation assets together. Then we can provide coordinated support to ensure that fledgling university businesses with valuable innovations, properly spin out of our universities, become a company in their own right, and grow and thrive. This, combined with creating capacity and capability to do end-to-end biologics discovery in the Liverpool city region, will entice a lot of talent and investment to come north.”
This collaboration will allow the Liverpool city region to retain the economic benefit of the research generated by its universities, create high-quality jobs, and ultimately advance health outcomes through innovative therapeutics.
Ways Health Innovation North West Coast are assisting:
- Working with Lyva Labs to deliver a pre-spin-out incubator to support higher-education provider assets in biologics/biomanufacturing
- Turning siloed pipelines into a singular BRITE pipeline that deliver innovators who are primed to use Liverpool’s biomanufacturing facilities.
- Monitoring the BRITE innovation pipeline and co-ordinating assets in an innovation’s early stages of development with partners and stakeholders.
- Hosting stakeholder and ecosystem workshops to inform the programme, gather feedback,and disseminate outcomes
The Liverpool City Region is uniquely positioned to be a global leader in biologics, as the UK’s first Health and Life Sciences Investment Zone. It’s home to world-leading universities conducting sector-leading scientific research, inpatient and outpatient clinical trial infrastructure and over 300 life sciences businesses generating £850m in Gross Value Added (GVA).
About BRITE
BRITE is a partnership led by LSTM, and includes the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and Edge Hill University. Other key partners involved are: Astra Zeneca, Unilever, Univercells, STFC Hartree Centre, Pharmaron, TriRX, the Pandemic Institute, Croda, Health Innovation North West Coast, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, iiCON, LyvaLabs, TriRX and Seqirus.
About Biologics
Biologics are complex medical products derived from living organisms, designed to prevent or treat a diverse range of infections and diseases, including emerging infectious diseases, cancer and antimicrobial resistance.
About University Commercialisation Ecosystem initiative
Research England is investing £30 million into four ambitious regional projects through its University Commercialisation Ecosystem initiative. These projects will bring together universities, industry and other partners to deliver a step change in knowledge exchange activity. It builds on the Connecting Capability Fund (CCF) and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, which aims to drive innovation by supporting collaboration and strengthening commercialisation capacity.
Find out more: University commercialisation ecosystems: invited full proposals – UKRI
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