Tips For Biotechs Considering Building Their Own Facilities

By Herman Bozenhardt and Erich Bozenhardt

The engineering discipline and technical skills needed to build a new biopharma facility are generally absent within a startup biotech. This is to be expected considering these young organizations are built around discovery scientists, their ideas, patents, and new technologies. They are typically not equipped to handle the rigid technical, cultural, and manufacturing challenges associated with the design and construction of a facility.

Most of these facilities will house new processes and new technologies and will enter clinical trials as soon as the manufacturing capability is ready. As such, there’s a new need for speed of execution, which makes scope precision, facility definition, and execution decisiveness vitally important. Here are some key issues to consider when tackling this daunting challenge.