Northumberland construction pioneer Merit Health has been awarded a contract to deliver a £30m manufacturing facility for Piramal Pharma Solutions.
The Cramlington offsite construction specialist will build the pharmaceutical firm’s new Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) plant for its Grangemouth site, and up to 80% of the technical building will be crafted at Merit’s base in the North East.
Piramal offers drug development and manufacturing solutions to global pharmaceutical companies, developing and manufacturing product including ADCs which are currently used in targeted cancer treatment, but have the potential for further applications. Demand for ADC therapies is in high demand, so Piramal need a fast-track solution to boost their manufacturing capabilities quickly.
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Merit Health will use its Flexi Pod solution, a hybrid of traditional techniques and offsite manufacturing, which is suited to larger technical buildings such as biopharma facilities and hospitals.
As 75% to 80% of the plant is made offsite, Merit’s Flexi Pod brings reduces the footprint and brings down overall costs, in terms of capital investment and ongoing revenue including maintenance and energy.
Tony Wells, chief executive officer at Merit Health, said: “We are delighted to be working on another important manufacturing facility expansion project, showing that the UK life sciences sector is on a significant and rapid growth trajectory.
“We understand that speed and cost-efficiency combined with minimised risk and successful ‘right first time’ validation are crucial for the timely development of such treatments.
“Our offsite offering was developed to support these imperatives meaning that critical therapies and products are in production and manufacturing significantly quicker than traditional methods of construction can offer.
“We are also proud to work with the Piramal team to eliminate scope 1 carbon emissions from the building design as well as scope 2&3 reduction through off-site manufacturing for sustainability as well as productivity.”
Merit launched its Merit Health offering in 2020 and since has been appointed for a number of UK-based construction projects in the sector, including the expansion of the rapid response facility in Darlington for CPI, a lateral flow manufacturing site for Abingdon Health in York and the UK’s first CAR-T cell manufacturing facility in Stevenage for Autolus Therapeutics.
