Pharma and medical device manufacturer, SMC, has announced the opening of Cambridge Pharma – a new business offering pharmaceutical development services.
The new 20,000sq ft facility – located at the Cambridge Research Park – includes a process development laboratory and an analytical laboratory.

Among the pioneering services is a sterile fill-finish facility which is designed to meet up-to-date regulatory requirements. Pivotally, it includes state-of-the-art heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and two clean rooms. Furthermore, each clean room is equipped with isolators and fill-finish equipment to support batch sizes from 100 units to 15,000 units in vials, cartridges or syringes.

Cambridge Pharma’s industrialisation engineers can take a customer’s laboratory scale formulation and develop a process for clinical trials in phases 1 to 3 including process development and filling of viscous formulations, suspensions and gels.  Meanwhile, non-standard primary drug containers can be accommodated, while container closure integrity tests and associated equipment can also be developed.

Chetan Patel, owner and CEO of SMC Group, has a strategic vision for the company: “We value pharmaceutical partnerships and continue to expand services in development, manufacturing and analytical testing to help accelerate drug product development. We are proud to launch ‘Cambridge Pharma’ as a part of our continued focus, growth and commitment to pharmaceutical products and services.”

Barbara Lead, Cambridge Pharma CEO, added: “I am really proud of our new facilities and the experience and expertise of our teams. We can provide a range of pharmaceutical development services and we have experience with difficult to fill formulations. We aim to provide an excellent service to customers for clinical trial supplies which are always on the critical path to market.”

Tim Holden, Cambridge Pharma’s commercial director, concluded: “Our principal aim is to meet the challenging schedules pharma clients face when planning clinical trial supplies. Specialising in this service ensures that development timelines can be minimised and cost savings can be made by our customers. We are very proud that our new facility has eco-friendly features which means we can help pharma and biotech companies meet their sustainability targets too.” 

Atos, in agreement with the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire, has announced the official opening of its global Life Sciences Centre of Excellence.

The facility will provide scientists on campus – as well as global genome and bio-data institutes worldwide – with early access to emerging technologies to support their research. It will also help to accelerate the process of bringing new drugs to market and deliver tangible societal benefits.

The centre will focus on exploration and discovery aimed at complementing the existing campus facilities with access to leading-edge technologies, such as high-performance computing and AI. The facility will also feature leading-edge technologies from Atos partners including Arm, Intel and NetApp.

Furthermore, Atos experts worldwide will collaborate directly with genome and biological data research scientists to help develop ideas – focusing specifically on the implementation of precision health and accelerating drug development using digital technologies.

Ultimately, the aim is to create solutions that enable healthcare organisations to design efficient strategies to prevent and manage disease, while supporting pharma and medtech organisations in accelerating treatments.

The outcomes from collaboration between Atos and the life sciences sector will be showcased at the Centre of Excellence through innovation workshops and demonstrations.

Dr Natalia Jimenez, global life sciences product lead at Atos, explained: “The opening of the Life Sciences Centre of Excellence is a significant milestone in Atos’ pioneering work to drive innovation in the healthcare and life sciences industry.”

“By providing an ecosystem where genome and biological data research scientists can access emerging technologies accompanied by leading Atos experts, the Centre of Excellence will play a crucial role in fostering life sciences discovery and innovation,” she added.