Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership Launched In U.K.

A new initiative in the U.K., The New Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP), formed by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) and the BioIndustry Association (BIA), aims to boost current innovative drug manufacturing and attract more business to the country.

With this goal in mind, the MMIP aims to bring key players in the British biopharma industry together with hopes that their mutual collaboration will create a more effective and innovative environment to keep Britain competitive on a global scale.

This new partnership will be led by Ian McCubbin, GlaxoSmith Kline SVP for North America, Japan, and Global Pharma Supply Chain. Some organizations involved in the partnership include Actavis, AstraZeneca, Eisai, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, GlaxoSmithKline, the Knowledge Transfer Network, Oxford BioMedica, and Pfizer.

According to McCubbin, “The U.K. has a strong foundation in manufacturing and it is vital that this partnership works to differentiate, defend, and grow the existing industry base.”

George Freeman, recently appointed MP Minister for Life Sciences, reports that drug manufacturing is already one of Britain’s leading manufacturing sectors with £22B ($36B) in exports.

According to the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the U.K. government has singled out drug innovation as a priority for investment, as this industry would provide an inevitable boost to the British economy by bringing about more high-skilled jobs and generating higher revenues.

The MMIP’s first order of business will be to provide a team with the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) to help British drug developers understand the landscape of public investments and funding options already available in the U.K.

The partnership has already prioritized key areas of current industry needs. These include technology, fiscal, regulatory, and skills environments, as well as actively promoting U.K.-based manufacturing overseas.

In recent years, the U.K. drug manufacturing industry has broadened past a focus on small molecules to include biologics and cell and gene therapy. Earlier this year, Genomics England, in collaboration with American Illumina, announced a four-year initiative  to map 100K genomes by 2017.