CPI has begun collaborations with academics and industry leaders within the pharma and digital spaces to develop a working model of a cloud-first manufacturing facility that will use technologies such as AI, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) to accelerate the speed at which new medicines are made.
The perks
Using these technologies in pharma could lead to patients gaining faster access to innovative treatments and could reduce operational costs for manufacturers by up to 30%.
Alongside cost reduction, digital manufacturing technologies also allow greater agility to scale production and meet changing demand, with some estimates suggesting a possible 50% increase in productivity.
The cost-savings made through the collaboration could also help to widen access to medicines, with half of the global population currently unable to access health services.
The digital collaboration at CPI’s Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre has already provided the pharma industry with significant benefits.
Success will be rooted in humans collaborating effectively
Collaboration is key
Earlier this year, a consortium of 13 partners found they could unlock faster, more effective digitalisation by working together to enable digital manufacturing methods. They achieved this by building digital architectures that track data from the ground up to ensure the right people or systems have access to information to make fast and effective decisions.
This meant creating standardised digital solutions tailored for each step of medicines development. Those solutions were also designed to interact with each other to produce real time data and improve the speed of decision making and ability to move onto the next phase of product development.
Now into its second year, the digital collaboration will look to further enhance digital manufacturing for novel therapies such as RNA vaccines and cell and gene therapies as well as taking on supply chain challenges.
This next step in the collaboration is being developed at CPI’s Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre near Glasgow, Scotland.
Dave Berry, Director of Digital Business Systems at CPI, said: “By providing pharma companies with a real-life replicable model of a cloud-first manufacturing facility, we will drive forward the digital capability of pharma manufacturers. However, our success will be rooted in humans collaborating effectively to deliver solutions that make a difference. We need to engage across pharma manufacturers of all scales if we are to realise the true potential of digitising medicines manufacturing.”