The new facility will be a not-for-profit organisation based at Harwell Campus, a science and technology campus located near Oxford.
Under normal circumstances, planning approval and construction for a new development of this scale would take years, with construction beginning only when planning permission had been granted.
Due to COVID-19, and VMIC’s national and international significance, Vale of White Horse District Council took a different approach and fast-tracked the application process, meaning that much of the planning work taking place behind the scenes was carried out simultaneously to construction work.
“We are extremely grateful to all the teams involved in working together to secure planning permission by moving at such a phenomenal speed.” said Dr Matthew Duchars, chief executive officer of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre. “This decision by the council gained us three critical months in our race to build a pandemic capable vaccine manufacturing facility, during which time we were able to go from a grass covered site to completion of the superstructure.”
An additional government grant of £93 million was awarded to VMIC in May with the purpose of expanding the facility’s capabilities and fast tracking the build of the 7,400m2 facility and bringing forward operational readiness to 2021, a year ahead of the original scheduled date.
Alongside this, VMIC has invested in more technology to increase its manufacturing capacity 20-fold, to be capable of producing 70 million pandemic vaccine doses in 4-6 months.
VMIC will occupy a prominent location on the 700-acre Harwell Campus, home to 6,000 people across 225 organisations. 30 universities are also represented onsite.
As a pillar organisation within the Harwell HealthTec Cluster (58 organisations, collectively employing 1,250 people), VMIC will be co-located with the UK’s open access National Laboratories, including the Diamond Light Source and The Rosalind Franklin Institute as well as innovative start-ups and SMEs through to multinationals working in the global and UK life sciences sector.
Harwell Campus www.harwellcampus.com
