There is a boom in biopharma

SOME of the biggest breakthroughs in medicine in the last decade or so have come from biopharma, which makes complex drugs to fight diseases such as cancer and arthritis.

But what is the difference between biopharma and pharma? The ‘pharma’ approach makes medicines via chemical processes, but biopharma gets living cells to make the medicines.

“The advantage of making medicines in living cells is that they can produce complex and effective medicines for a range of previously unmet needs,” says Killian O’Driscoll.

“But making biopharma medicines involves advanced manufacturing processes, including growing the cells in large numbers in bioreactors.”

O’Driscoll is the Director of Projects at the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), which provides training and research services to biopharma companies in Ireland and internationally.

NIBRT, is a global centre for excellence in bioprocessing and is a collaboration between University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and IT Sligo.

The biopharma sector is growing rapidly in Ireland, thanks in part to the roughly US$10billion of investment the global biopharmaceutical industry has made here in the last decade. He explains: “The top biopharma companies in the world have operations here, and lots of them are household names like Pfizer, MSD, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli-Lilly.”

Each year NIBRT trains around 4,000 people who want to work in biopharma manufacturing, including school leavers, employees of biopharma companies and graduate-level researchers.

O’Driscoll notes that NIBRT provides courses on the Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Bioprocess Engineering in DCU, which recently scooped the Postgraduate Course of the Year Award in Health Sciences at the gradireland Higher Education Awards.