The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) and GE Healthcare, recently opened the training facility. The NIBRT-GE Single-Use Centre of Excellence features the latest technologies, that will further boost biomanufacturing skills and expertise in Ireland, Europe and around the world.
Ireland is one of the world’s top biopharmaceutical manufacturing locations and has seen more than €10 billion investment in the past 10 years from global companies. NIBRT has a key role in modernising and supporting the sector’s infrastructure and talent development.
The institute is seeing increasing demand for single-use technologies or disposables, bringing more flexibility to biomanufacturing; an important requirement as more precise therapies are being developed for smaller patient populations.
Dominic Carolan, CEO at NIBRT, said: “NIBRT are delighted to launch the NIBRT-GE Single-Use Centre of Excellence, which will enable us to provide high quality training programmes in all aspects of single-use biopharma manufacturing. In addition, we look forward to working with our clients on a broad range of process development and optimisation activities in this innovative centre.”
The new centre will also support GE BioPark Cork; a GE-managed campus including four prefabricated off the shelf biologics factories, owned by independent biopharma companies manufacturing proprietary medicines, creating up to 500 jobs. The training centre at NIBRT is where the personnel will learn about the technologies used at BioPark.
David Radspinner, General Manager at BioPark GE Healthcare, said: “The biopharma industry is growing rapidly; of the top 10 therapeutics on the market today, eight are biopharmaceuticals. Our customers are constantly looking for flexible ways to improve capacity and the efficiency of their manufacturing operations. We need to foster innovation and partner with the best to respond to this need — with the NIBRT partnership and GE BioPark Cork we are doing exactly this.”
The NIBRT-GE Single-Use Centre of Excellence is run by NIBRT, and GE is the technology provider delivering a fully integrated biomanufacturing platform based on single-use technologies to the centre.
The training activities are expected to be operational in autumn 2017, and the training offering is open for registration after the opening event. The partnership is initially signed for 3 years with the objective to upgrade the equipment after that, so that NIBRT would always have the top of the line equipment at its institute.
