BRITE

The challenge

The UK has strong expertise in biologics. Biologics make up around 25% of the UK pharmaceutical market and are valued at about £46bn a year. Despite this, we still lack some of the infrastructure needed to turn world-class academic discoveries into new medicines.

Biologics rely on complex manufacturing and specialist facilities. We need the right capacity to develop them, scale them, and take them into clinical trials so they can reach patients.

Right now, there are too few local biomanufacturing facilities. There are also barriers to effective commercialisation, which can stop biologics assets being commercialised locally.

About the project

BRITE is a cross-sector partnership between universities and industry. Research England’s University Commercialisation Ecosystem fund has awarded BRITE close to £5m to help build the capacity needed to grow the regional and national biologics ecosystem. This includes tackling challenges in biologics manufacture and commercial scale-up.

We aim to help establish the Liverpool City Region as a global leader in biologics innovation and manufacturing, so biologics assets developed here can be commercialised locally.

This collaboration will help the Liverpool City Region keep more of the economic benefit from university-led research, create high-quality jobs, and improve health outcomes through new therapeutics.

Our partners

BRITE is led by LSTM, with core university partners:

• University of Liverpool
• Liverpool John Moores University
• Edge Hill University

Other key partners include:

• AstraZeneca
• Unilever
• Univercells
• STFC Hartree Centre
• Pharmaron
• TriRX
• The Pandemic Institute (TPI)
• Croda
• Health Innovation North West Coast (HINWC)
• Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCR CA)
• iiCON
• LyvaLabs
• Seqirus

This partnership is working within the Liverpool City Region, the UK’s first Health and Life Sciences Investment Zone. The region is home to world-leading universities, inpatient and outpatient clinical trial infrastructure, and over 300 life sciences businesses, generating £850m in Gross Value Added.