North East construction firm Merit has completed the first phase of a £66m advanced therapies manufacturing site in record time.
Cramlington-based Merit, an offsite engineering and construction firm which specialises in technically complex buildings, has announced the milestone at Autolus Therapeutics in Stevenage – the base for the UK’s first purpose-built CAR-T cell manufacturing facility. Merit delivered the milestone in 17 months, three years faster than the biotech industry standard of around five years. That includes time for planning and design and only 12 months spent on site.
The firm was appointed as the main contractor to deliver the new four-storey 81,000-sqft facility for Autolus, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing next-generation T-cell therapies for cancer treatments. The new facility is part of a larger plan to create a life sciences district in Stevenage by developers Reef Group and UBS Asset Management.
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It will also add to the growth of the cell and gene cluster in the town centre, currently the third largest in the world. Phase one sees the handover of Grade C clean rooms to Autolus, enabling the firm to move into the next phase of growth.
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Once completed, the facility is expected to process 2,000 treatments annually and create 400 new jobs in Stevenage. The design of the new facility uses Merit’s Flexi Pod, a hybrid solution suitable for complex high-tech facilities which features aspects of modern methods of construction for the shell and core, as well as its Pre-Assembled Modules and Pod strategy.
Merit built 75% of the high-tech building offsite at its site in Cramlington using 300 PAMs (pre assembled modules) and 15 UltraPODs totalling 900 tons before shipping them to Stevenage for installation by its specialist team. The firm’s CEO Tony Wells said the company’s solutions provided a step change in construction productivity, sustainability and time, while reducing carbon emissions and accelerating delivery times.
The methods also cut capital and revenue costs and reduced external professional consultant fees.
Mr Wells: “This project is of critical importance to the UK biotech industry and we are very proud to have been able to deploy our unique offsite construction methods to deliver this vital facility in record time.
“Productivity is an issue in traditional construction method, but our approach means projects are delivered more quickly and also crucially more sustainably.”
Piers Slater, chief executive of Reef Group: “Combining the expertise and capability of UrbanR, our in-house design division, with Merit’s innovative and technology-based approach from concept design to commissioning and validation produced a unique and successful recipe for accelerating the construction of a complicated project.”
Olivia Drew, portfolio manager of UBS UK Life Sciences, said :“Merit’s approach to quality, speed, sustainability and resilience has enabled them to deliver on all the key requirements for this project and we look forward to continued collaboration across our platform.”
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