Aesica Partnering with Durham and Leeds Universities
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Aesica has announced its second major innovation board partnership following the recent annual Genesis conference, a famed hotbed of future innovation.
The METRC Innovation Awards support new research between universities and companies in the fields of nanotechnology, science and engineering.
Aesica, the University of Durham and the University of Leeds were jointly awarded the grant to investigate and accelerate the development of processes that will improve cost efficiencies and increase manufacturing capacity at its Cramlington site.
Earlier this year, the company established the Aesica Innovation Board (AIB) to identify and commercialize new innovative technologies that help to bridge the growing R&D gap and the company is actively targeting academia and innovative businesses to form development partnerships with.
This latest partnership builds on the successful collaboration with Bradford University earlier in the year.
The new partnership with the University of Durham and the University of Leeds will be tasked with developing new or improved routes for the manufacture of an API.
A detailed kinetic study is already underway and based on this, new flow processes will be developed before being scaled up at the Aesica Cramlington plant.
"Professor Andrew Whiting from Durham University and Professor Frans Muller from Leeds University will work together on a new collaborative METRC-funded project with the global pharmaceutical manufacturer, Aesica Pharmaceuticals. Alternative manufacturing processes will be investigated to increase the manufacturing capacity of the API, as well as exploring how to achieve cost efficiencies at the Aesica Cramlington manufacturing site, which is based in the North East of England. If, as expected, this joint collaboration leads to commercialization of new processes, it would become a key partnership." Prof. Steve Armes, Academic Director of METRC.
“We are delighted to officially embark on this partnership with Andy at the University of Durham and Frans at the University of Leeds. Andy and Frans have been hugely supportive of the mandate of the Aesica Innovation Board: to bring together the best that industry and academia have to offer, in the interests of pharmaceutical innovation. The successful METRC application will allow us to invest in researching an improved manufacturing process, and critically, establish a successful model for future collaboration with Durham and Leeds universities” Barrie Rhodes, Director of Technology Development, Aesica Pharmaceuticals.
