A biopharma scale-up manufacturing facility with a built-up area of one lakh sqft and next generation laboratory space Telangana government is developing in Genome Valley, near Hyderabad, will help consolidate the State’s position in the biopharma space, Industries and IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao has said.

B-Hub, the facility, is being set up with an objective of providing impetus to the biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing in the country. It will address various challenges faced by biopharma companies and offer substantial benefits to the overall ecosystem. Key benefits would range from reduced time to market, process efficiency and scalability as well as in terms of monitoring compliance and genetic stability, a release from the Minister’s office said.

In tweets complementing the release on Sunday, Mr. Rao said B-hub will be first-of-its-kind growth-phase centre and biopharma scale-up manufacturing facility in India. It will be operational in 15 months and help consolidate Telangana’s leadership position in biopharma space. With a built-up area of one lakh sq ft, which is to be developed over two phases, the facility will compliment the extraordinary ecosystem at Genome Valley.

Telangana government is developing the facility in partnership with the Centre’s Department of Biotechnology, Cytiva and Cerestra. The project is envisioned to be an accelerator for biopharma innovation featuring next gen lab suites, encouraging both startups midsized companies to interact and collaborate through collective spaces and lead innovation, he tweeted.

Seeking to highlight how biopharma scale-up manufacturing facility with turnkey laboratory space is a key requirement to facilitate growth of biosimilars in the Lifesciences industry, the Minister’s office said there is no such full-fledged infrastructure anywhere in the country at present. Establishment of an end-to-end biopharma upscale facility, including bioreactors and vessels which contain cell culture media to the filtration units and the downstream chromatography processes will provide a platform for the start-ups, mid-sized and even large biopharma companies to carry out their pre-clinical validation in the proposed facility ahead of significant capital expenditure in the product, it said in the release.