On July 29, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and Affiliate Provost Krystyn Van Vliet attended a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the development of Landmark Bio, a new 40,000-sq. foot biopharma producing facility at The Arsenal on the Charles in Watertown, Massachusetts. Jongyoon Han, MIT professor of electrical engineering and organic engineering, and Richard D. Braatz, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, faculty analysis officer, and professor of chemical engineering at MIT also attended the celebration.
Landmark Bio emerged from a general public-non-public partnership shaped in 2019 between MIT and four founding customers: Harvard University, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, Cytiva, and Alexandria True Estate Equities.
The facility — which will property producing and improvement spaces less than the identical roof — is open to MIT college and their study teams conducting investigate to advance mobile-based mostly and RNA-based mostly therapies for complicated illnesses this kind of as cancer, as perfectly as for regenerative medication. Landmark Bio’s mission is to advance and take out obstacles to production technologies although serving as a forum for workforce enhancement obtainable to workers in Massachusetts and further than.
“With this collaboration among the academia, sector, and authorities, we have a collective opportunity to progress the systems that manufacture and distribute new and future-generation medications by incubating and examining the info driving individuals technologies,” says Schmidt. “MIT is happy to perform a job in the improvement of new technologies to make, measure, and assess new medications far better than we can currently.”
For MIT, the partnership will join to the Institute’s ongoing innovative production workforce advancement efforts which include a hands-on mobile therapy manufacturing providing piloted this earlier spring at MIT. Van Vliet led the progress of a program to coach workers pursuing careers in superior biomanufacturing in Greater Boston-Cambridge and outside of. Extra than 2,000 pupils in the United States and from 90 other countries enrolled in the very first on the net providing.
“This contains MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation as effectively as on line classes and palms-on teaching to empower reskilling and upskilling of tomorrow’s manufacturing workforce. Many roles are desired to make these subsequent-generation medicines reach more sufferers,” suggests Van Vliet.
A community-private collaboration, Landmark Bio spouse associates incorporate Beth Israel Deaconess Health-related Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute, Massachusetts Normal Hospital, and the Massachusetts Everyday living Sciences Centre.
“The partnership promotes cross-sector collaborations to speed up innovation and fortify the primary placement of the Commonwealth in the existence sciences,” suggests Ran Zheng, Landmark Bio’s chief executive officer. “One of the initiatives we are collaborating on is workforce improvement. With MIT’s earth-course strategy to educating and discovering and Landmark Bio’s slicing-edge system improvement and biomanufacturing facility, we imagine we can provide an immersive learning working experience to a assorted pool of expertise, help tackle the workforce shortage in novel modality progress and producing, and help the expansion of the life sciences sector.”
Each individual of the founding associates invested in the building and functions of the facility, which is slated to open in 2022.