The historical role of the British city of Liverpool as a trading port has helped it to become a center of excellence for vaccine manufacturing. That’s according to the vice president of manufacturing at one of the world’s largest manufacturers of influenza vaccines.
Nige Hilton, VP of manufacturing and site head at Liverpool-based CSL Seqirus, says that a combination of historical factors has led to the city excelling in the production of vaccines to treat infectious disease.
“The Liverpool City region has been identified by the U.K. Government Department of Business and Industrial Strategy as a high potential opportunity for research and development into infectious disease and for the manufacturing of vaccines,” he says.
“They’ve put a prospectus together, promoting Liverpool, which is now going out to trade envoys around the world.”
Hilton presented on Liverpool’s biopharmaceutical history during a panel discussion at the 21st Annual bioProcessUK Conference, held in Liverpool at the end of last year.
According to Hilton, Liverpool first became associated with research into infectious disease due to its history as a trading port.
Sailors came back with tropical infectious diseases, such as typhoid and smallpox, which they spread to the local population, creating a commercial incentive to treat disease.
Working with the government in the 1890s, shipping and warehousing companies helped found the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), he says. Researchers at the LSTM then made key discoveries about parasites and viruses causing tropical disease.
Another factor in Liverpool’s success as a manufacturing center was its role as a port during the Industrial Revolution, he explains. The city already had a skilled workforce and investment flooded into canals and railways.
The burgeoning U.K. chemical industry, including companies like Lever Brothers, founded plants in the Liverpool region led, in turn, to Evans Medical, which was the first pharmaceutical company to set up in the Liverpool region.
Later, other pharmaceutical companies followed, along with the Pandemic Institute, leading to the creation of a lively ecosystem of universities and companies, working together to tackle pandemics and research and develop treatments for infectious disease.
Today and going forward, Hilton believes Liverpool’s facilities are critical to the U.K. Government’s pandemic response. This includes potentially responding to a future avian flu pandemic.
“We’re seeing a lot of crossover events with avian influenza into mammalian species and, regrettably, it’s probably only a question of time before it goes to human-to-human transmission,” he says.
“The work we’re doing with the Pandemic Institute will hopefully not only inform strategy for companies such as ourselves, but also those trying to establish in the U.K.”
