_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ VR

/ AR

In addition,‘ biologics’( which includes vaccines, blood components, somatic cells and tissues) may be highly effective against a variety of currently untreatable conditions, but they tend to be heat sensitive and susceptible to contamination, and the initial parts of the manufacturing process are particularly delicate.

Finally, ground-breaking personalized therapies are starting to emerge- but they are produced in multiple small batches, which means production is costly, they are difficult to reproduce at scale, and they require highly skilled operators.

In the face of these challenges, it doesn’ t help that advanced medicines manufacturing is suffering from a serious skills gap, and that not enough young people are entering the sector. So, how can this be addressed?

To start, by not only encouraging young people to take STEM subjects at school, but also by making them aware of the many career options available to them within the sciences. Then, by developing training programs that teach the necessary skills for working in the sector. That’ s precisely the remit of a twoyear, £ 4.5 million government program, RESILIENCE – the UK’ s Medicines Manufacturing Skills Centre of Excellence, which is designed specifically to address the sector’ s skills gap and create a trained and qualified next-generation workforce.

Real-world problems

Gaining access to laboratories or advanced manufacturing facilities for training is disruptive and expensive –

Critically, the computergenerated environment can be an exact replica of a realworld environment

people must travel there, materials are consumed, training staff must be onhand, working days are interrupted.

However, VR technology dramatically reduces the dependency on real-world facilities, removing the need to consume expensive materials and enabling training anywhere at any time.

So, it should not be a surprise that VR is a key enabling technology for training. The RESILIENCE program, which started in April 2024, has so far achieved a significant level of training via outreach programs:

■ 1200 trainees attended industry relevant events led by RESILIENCE partners

■ 13,500 students from across the UK participated in training and outreach activities through 170 events

■ 75 future sector leaders from 23 organizations developed skills through the leadership accelerator programs These are hugely encouraging results, and the RESILIENCE partner organizations( University of Birmingham, University College London, Teesside University, Heriot-Watt, University) continue to collaborate to deliver training, outreach, and educational resources, working with other institutions and the NHS. Life sciences is a key sector for the UK economy; the recently published Life sciences competitiveness indicators 2024 noted that pharmaceutical manufacturing’ s gross value added( GVA) was £ 13.7 billion in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership( MMIP), which represents medicines manufacturers in the UK, noted in 2023 that medicines manufacturing generates the majority of life sciences jobs.

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