Currie & Brown to provide project management and project controls services on new Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre project
1 July 2019
Currie & Brown has been appointed by the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre Ltd (VMIC) to provide project management and project controls services on their VMIC project in Oxford.
VMIC has successfully secured £66 million of funding from UK Research and Innovation. It is being established as a new, not-for-profit research company within the national scientific infrastructure to provide strategic vaccine development and manufacturing capability. The company is supported by its three founding members: University of Oxford, Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, each with extensive experience in the development and clinical evaluation of novel vaccines. VMIC will also receive in-kind industry funding from Janssen, Merck and GE Healthcare.
The centre will provide training and expertise to academic groups and help to produce a new generation of development and manufacturing scientists and operatives who can continue to build the UK industry. VMIC will help to stimulate the UK vaccines industry by providing infrastructure and expertise to academia and SMEs to allow them to develop their products to an inflection point that attracts further investment. It will also serve as an emergency response capability for the UK government in order to produce vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and the deliberate/accidental release of biological agents.
Scheduled to open in 2022, the new laboratory and production facilities will be developed in accordance with GMP and MHRA regulations and will have complex zoned HVAC systems.
Richard Cairnes, director at Currie & Brown, commented: “The VMIC project is being developed through the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for Medicines Manufacturing, and we are delighted to be appointed as project manager as well as to provide project controls services on such a high-profile project. The VMIC team is great to work with and the new facility will be a national centre of excellence, providing strategic vaccine development and manufacturing capability in the UK.”