Rather than one international day, different global regions celebrate Manufacturing Day at different times.
What is Manufacturing Day?
In the United Kingdom it’s held on the last Thursday of September, while in the United States it’s the first Friday of October.
Wherever you are, the message of the day is to open manufacturing up to the masses and show people what it entails. In many places, companies and educational institutions open their factory doors to the interested public to show what manufacturing processes and careers involve.
We don’t have manufacturing doors to open, but manufacturing is a constant consideration within our work.
How is CELT connected to manufacturing?
The Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) is co-Directed by Professor Andrew Owen and Professor Steve Rannard, who bring together our multidisciplinary, cross-faculty team. Our specialism is the development and fundamental understanding of long-acting medications.
We often work with drugs that are already on the market in short-acting form because we know they are already safe and effective. Our hope is that this will reduce the time it takes to get medication to the patients who need them.
There are many steps in this process, and while it is clear to most that we need to research and test medicines, there is so much more involved. There are important considerations for downstream manufacturing.
Why do the manufacturing stages require so much consideration within long-acting therapeutics work?
In CELT’s research labs, we can make enough of a medicine to conduct initial tests. However, it requires much more than what we can produce for the stages after our preclinical work. We need to find manufacturers who can work with us to scale up our long-acting medicines for clinical trials, and manufacturers who can scale up production enough for when it goes to market.
There are licencing and legal steps along the way, but even the process of finding a suitable manufacturer for the medications we make requires a huge amount of work. Long-acting therapeutics use relatively new drug delivery methods and aren’t necessarily made the way their short-acting predecessors were. This means we need to work carefully with pharmaceutical manufacturers to ensure they can reproduce the methods necessary for the medicine, and at a scale appropriate to ensure our work can have a truly global reach.
Within CELT, we have a Unitaid funded project underway to help us, and everyone else in the long-acting therapeutics industry, with this.
What is the Manufacturing Capability project?
CELT recognises that local manufacturing can play a critical role in improving access to medicine. For developers of long-acting medicines, however, information about manufacturing capacity and capabilities in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs) is fragmented and difficult to access. This is where the Manufacturing Capability project comes in.
To help close this gap, CELT is actively engaging with the wider manufacturing community, with a focus on LMIC-based facilities and partners. By consolidating and sharing knowledge, CELT aims to make it easier for medicine developers to identify opportunities, build collaborations, and ultimately strengthen local production capacity in support of sustainable and equitable access.
What is the intended outcome of the project and who is it for?
As part of our strategy to engage manufacturers in LMICs, we aim to assess their current production capabilities to identify and form relationships with potential partners for manufacturing our long-acting medicines. Information gathered will be compiled into an open, accessible database to help other developers efficiently identify suitable manufacturers and therefore support overall advancements of long-acting medicines.
What is the patient benefit of our Manufacturing Capability project?
CELT’s biggest hope from this project is that patients will directly benefit from improved access to medicine. Local manufacturing may create the opportunity to respond better to local health needs, and the potential to reduce dependency on imports to lower costs for both health care systems and the patients themselves. Irrespective of where manufacturing occurs, global health stakeholders need to understand which generic manufacturers have existing capability for which long-acting technologies.
A few years ago, a lot of industries started using the phrase ‘think globally, act locally’ and it’s still relevant today. Global health is literally in our organisation’s name, and we hope a better understanding of global generic manufacturing capabilities will facilitate better implementation of long-acting products in low- and middle-income countries. Working to produce medications locally could be an incredibly powerful way to directly benefit the patients most at need. By making sure all our work is findable, accessible and useable, we hope this ethos will spread through other teams who share our values and beyond.
#ManufacturingDay
The Manufacturing Capability project is funded by global health agency Unitaid.
