HOPE IN COVID TIMES
How Irish life sciences industry is helping to fast-track testing ,
BY 1964, Ireland was in the midst of an economic revolution, transforming from Éamon de Valera’s vision of a closed economy to ushering in foreign direct investment under Taoiseach Seán Lemass.
That year, a New Yorkbased company called Squibb — once a supplier of medicines to the Union Army during the American Civil War — became one of the first foreign pharmaceutical companies to locate in Ireland, bulk-manufacturing key ingredients in Swords, north county Dublin, for the production of tablets and capsules.
More than half a century later, what is now Bristol Myers Squibb was responsible for Ireland’s second-largest foreign direct investment (FDI) in life sciences when it built its $900m (€760m) biologic drug facility in Cruiserath, near Blanchardstown. The plant at the campus was designed for large-scale production of immuno-oncology medicines that harness the body’s own immune system to fight tumour cells. Opdivo, used to treat some forms of lung cancer, is now one of the top-selling treatments in the world.
Exports of medical and pharmaceutical products helped drive the value of goods exports from Ireland up 6pc to €67.7bn in the first five months of 2020, according to the Central Statistics Office. In May alone, medical and pharmaceutical exports surged 44pc to €5.2bn, accounting for two-fifths of total exports. As the restrictions imposed on Ireland to fight Covid-19 leave economic devastation in their wake, could the linchpin that is life sciences help rescue the economy?
Barry Heavey, the head of life sciences at Accenture Ireland, says: “While it’s obviously a hugely difficult time for the hospitality industry and for a lot of the services sector generally, we are somewhat lucky to have such a large contribution to our economy from industries that are less affected by this, like the life sciences and tech industries.
“[Accenture] is seeing more activity in the months since [the pandemic began] because Covid creates a huge focus on the importance of the supply chain and manufacturing for new Covid drugs or vaccines.”
By April, one of the biggest problems facing countries globally in testing for Covid-19 was a shortage of the reagents needed for the tests. The following month, an Irish group of biopharma companies — including Bristol Myers Squibb — and academics at third-level institutions said it had manufactured enough of the reagent lysis buffer to support 180,000 tests. The consortium imported the raw materials for lysis buffer, which was then manufactured by the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (Nibrt).
The work highlighted how the Irish life sciences industry — which incorporates everything from biopharma and biotechnology to medical devices and advanced therapy medicinal products (medicines based on genes, tissues or cells) – has collaborated in fast-tracking Covid-19 tests and treatment as the world awaits a vaccine. At the end of last month, American biomedical company Beckman Coulter said it planned to hire at least 30 more staff in the east Clare village of Tulla, where its facility is manufacturing a key antibody test in the fight against Covid-19.
The life sciences sector in Ireland has moved up the value chain since the pharma industry’s humble beginnings in the 1960s, when bulk-manufactured ingredients were then shipped off to facilities in other countries for finishing. There were waves of investment from companies such as Pfizer, Merck (known as MSD in Europe) and Eli Lilly during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and the emergence of blockbuster brands such as Lipitor and Viagra being manufactured in Cork.
When Julie O’Neill started off in the industry in the late 1980s, it was “very traditional”. But Ireland became a European gateway for the pharma-chem industry in the 1980s and 1990s because “American companies understood that they could use Ireland to access Europe”.
O’Neill, who sits as a non-executive director on a number of boards, including Icon, is a former executive vice-president for global operations at Alexion and a one-time Ireland general manager at Gilead Sciences. Earlier this summer, Gilead received authorisation for its antiviral drug Remdesivir in the treatment of patients hospitalised with Covid-19.
“Because of the way the European directives were established, you were able to bring products into one jurisdiction in the EU and then distribute them to others without any further testing or release oversight. A lot of expertise then grew up in the clusters around Cork and Dublin and in Galway for medical devices.”
The industry experienced turbulence between 2011 and 2016, when patents on blockbuster drugs expired. A stream of new investments in biopharmaceuticals allowed Ireland to reposition itself and move further up the value chain. In the past decade, some €10bn has been pumped into new and expanded biopharma and biotech production facilities in the country, representing “close to the biggest wave of investment in new biotech facilities anywhere in the world”, according to IDA Ireland.
Heavey says: “All these capital investments in the last ten years have led to a lot of fancy new facilities that are geared up to make the most complex new drugs in the pipeline. For example, MSD has a drug that’s been approved for five years called Keytruda and that stimulates your own immune system to fight cancer and it’s been approved for a large array of cancers and is continuing to show efficacies for more and more cancers. Some analysts say that it will reach at least €20bn in sales. It’s quite complex to manufacture but MSD had put the supply chain for that product into Ireland because Ireland has done a really good job in making products similar to Keytruda. MSD and other companies like it have a lot of new products like that coming through their pipeline.
“The big area of interest is whether we catch the third wave of innovation in the pharmaceutical sector. Globally, you are seeing a new wave of therapies that are even more complex, involving genetic vectors that can potentially cure people of their disease. There are a number of exciting new drugs in this space, like Luxturna, a type of gene therapy that actually cures a specific type of genetic blindness. But that product requires a very different type of manufacturing and as those products become more successful, Ireland needs to ensure they are in the game for the manufacturing of those products, that we have the people, the infrastructure and the investment to catch that third wave.”
To do so, existing pharma workers and new entrants to the industry need to be upskilled, according to Heavey and O’Neill. Nibrt, which retained pharma workers for the biotech wave, could play a role in that, says O’Neill, who sits on the board of the institute.
“As a society, particularly post-Covid, we will need to have an openness to re-training and to support people through that re-training if necessary. We are going to have a pool of people for whom, unfortunately, the job losses being sustained through Covd-19 could be permanent. If they were interested, they could be used to fulfil recruitment challenges in the life sciences sector.
“There are some investments that could be made in the university sector with Nibrt to prepare for the future to ensure we have a good research framework,” she says. “Also, the apprenticeship model has been used successfully in other European countries as a means of bringing people into the life sciences sector. We could look at that as an opportunity for young people who do not want to go on to university. There’s also an opportunity to use the apprenticeship model to retrain individuals.”
The Covid-19 restrictions on people entering workplaces has also highlighted for life sciences companies the importance of gearing up to ‘Industry 4.0’, using digital tools and data analytics to make that manufacturing and the supply chain more efficient, Heavey says.
“The Irish market for life sciences will grow in two ways: there will be some new investment and new factories built, but there will also be a lot of re-investment in digitising existing facilities.
“I think there is going to be a lot of focus on this when we’re past the worst period of the pandemic. A lot of companies will start thinking about how they can run their operations in a different, more efficient way. People have been restricted into going into their facility. Obviously, you need some core people to do the manufacturing but a lot of the other ancillary activity can be done remotely using digital tools. That has been a boon for Accenture from a growth perspective.
“The key thing about each of these waves is that the drugs that we are making are becoming more complex with each wave: you’re moving from making bicycles to making aeroplanes to making space shuttles. But you can’t rely on your ability to make bicycles to win the manufacturing for the space shuttle — you have to develop that in parallel, and there’s a lot of competition globally for making space shuttles so we need to make sure we’re investing and looking out for those opportunities so we can pounce.”
This is where the IDA comes in. However, it warned last month that the outlook for FDI as a whole over the next two years is “very challenging”, as the pandemic continues to disrupt global trade. While life sciences have so far proven resilient, Ireland will see more competition from other countries looking to multinational life science investments for growth, according to Michael Lohan, head of life sciences at the state agency.
“Every nation will be looking now to secure a smaller pool of FDI and they will be looking to those industry segments that are continuing to grow and show strength,” he says. “Traditionally, a country that would have focused on heavier engineering or aerospace will look to pivot more towards the sustainable growth area that is life sciences. But Ireland has a formula that works.”