Following the success of winning two awards in this year's Queen's Awards for Enterprise, PSL Powder Systems' employees Camille Flores-Kilfoyle (Marketing & Business Development Manager), Michelle Frisch (Sr. Manager, Global Technical Systems), Carter (Control Assembly Technician) and Christian Parker (Head of Engineering) travelled to London on 20 July to attend a ceremony held at Buckingham Palace.
Liverpool-based PSL was one of six small-and-medium-sized companies to achieve double recognition by being a winner in both the Innovation and International trade categories.
More than 200 businesses across the UK travelled to Buckingham Palace to receive their Queen’s Awards.
Amanda Pitcher, PSL Managing Director, said: 'Winning a Queen’s Award for Enterprise is a huge achievement as a business – particularly in a special year, as we celebrate H.M. The Queen’s 90th birthday. We were ecstatic and slightly overwhelmed to find out that we had won two awards for both International Trade and Innovation.'
PSL took its Innovation Award for developing an efficient manufacturing process for microspheres of uniform size and distribution used in drug delivery. Polymeric microspheres are used as time-released capsules in injectable drugs with a range of potential applications from vaccines, hormones, anti-cancer drugs to diabetes treatment. A non-uniform microsphere mix would make the drug less effective.
The firm has developed a machine that can efficiently produce sterile, uniform beads of the right size. The process incorporates a number of steps into a single machine that can scale from small to full commercial production sizes. The machine uses 98.7% of the pharmaceutical product, which is very important to manufacturers as every gram of product can be valued at several thousands of dollars.
PSL also won an International Trade Award for outstanding growth in overseas sales over three years.
Originally a turnkey engineering provider, a range of product innovations in 2010 enabled the company to move to being a product based manufacturer. Products were specifically designed to address global market demands and overseas sales account for more than 90% of total turnover. Traditional markets in Europe and the US remain strong, but in the last three years business has expanded into India, Latin America, Australia, China and SE Asia. Exports have grown by more than 40% over three years.