“WE MUST MAKE MORE OF OUR INVENTIONS”

The UK must make more of its inventions was the call from manufacturers attending the annual Bessemer Society Oxford dinner, held in the city.

This year’s topic at the annual Bessemer Society Oxford dinner was Life Science Manufacturing Ambition with speakers drawn from the life sciences manufacturing sector.

Nick Page is Head of Manufacturing at Oxford BioMedica which manufactures life-changing gene therapies. The company has grown significantly over the last five years and Nick discussed his experiences of setting up manufacturing facilities in China and India.

“In China, there are thousands of graduates who want to work for Western companies in their country. If the government wants you, they will make things easy. The political climate is very different from here, but the salaries of top managers are much the same as in Western countries.”

India’s workers have more employment rights, and its graduates are well-educated and loyal, he said.

Oxford BioMedica is building an 84,000 sq ft facility in the city. Called Oxbox, (it was formerly occupied by Royal Mail), it will provide new clean rooms, offices, warehousing and laboratories at Oxford Business Park, Cowley.

The expansion will enable the Group to more than double its bioprocessing capacity, and Oxford BioMedica plans to boost its workforce from 500 to 600 this year.

Also speaking at the Bessemer Society dinner was Dr Gordon Sanghera, Chief Executive of Oxford Nanopore.

One of the UK’s few billion dollar- valued businesses, known as unicorns, Oxford Nanopore has been valued at one and a half billion dollars.

This country is is punching well above its weight in turning out innovations, he said. His concern is that the UK lags behind in the development of industrial processes to get these to the next level. “Industrial innovation does not yet have a voice at government level. We need to work together to make that happen and the Bessemer Society is a great platform to make the case,” he said.

“As a collective we need to think big. To move forward together.”

Oxford Nanopore is building a multimillion-pound manufacturing facility at

Harwell in Oxfordshire. The facility will have one of the largest clean room areas in the UK.

Oxford Nanopore’s technology will give everyone access to DNA sequencing, allowing us to diagnose ourselves without recourse to a doctor.

Gordon predicts that within five years, the company’s pocket-sized portable device for biological analysis, called a MinION, will be as ubiquitous as the mobile phone.

“We have built a new factory in the UK partly because we want to protect our intellectual property, but more importantly we have a manufacturing heritage born in the Victorian era that no-one else has in the world. We are about to enter the genomic DNA information age.

“We all need to be bold, to be ambitious. We must create new companies from

Oxford Nanopore boosts manufacturing capability at Harwell

Oxford Nanopore has started hightech, automated manufacturing processes at its new factory at Harwell Campus near Oxford.

The MinION building has been designed to look like Oxford Nanopore’s portable real-time device for DNA and RNA sequencing.

our ideas, but they will fail without manufacturing expertise.”

Keynote speaker for the evening was Dr Andy Jones, Director of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Medicines Manufacturing Challenge. He said: “Manufacturing is at the forefront of the UK’s industrial strategy.

“One of the government’s ambitions is for the UK to be the best place in the world to make medicines, because medicine manufacturing is the most productive part of the most productive sector of our economy.”

A lot of manufacturing has gone overseas and quality has often suffered as a result, he said. But manufacturing is critical in the future development of medicines and better manufacturing technology brings improved quality control, he added.

“As a nation, we are brilliant at invention. We are not so good with industrial methods and processes.”

The new manufacturing facility brings highly automated production processes to the manufacturing of consumable flow cells for Oxford Nanopore’s novel, real-time DNA/ RNA sequencing devices.

Full production will be phased in over the coming months. The factory will significantly increase production capability.

Intellectual snobbery is holding the UK back, alongside out-dated ideas of what manufacturing is among the uninformed majority, and a lack of grand ambition, he added.

“Our innovation in medicines manufacturing has given us a unique capability to support the development of ideas.

“No other country has the infrastructure to de-risk new technologies that we have through our High Value Catapults, manufacturing innovation centres and other support structures,” he said.

“But until the public appreciates the benefits of manufacturing, the politicians won’t either, and won’t see the essential need to invest the sums needed.”