Building One of Canada’s Most Comprehensive Biomanufacturing Platforms in Montreal
RampUp and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) are joining forces to accelerate the development and production of vaccines and biotherapeutics. Building on an already well-established collaboration, the two organizations will soon work side by side in shared facilities at NRC Royalmount.
Cell culture incubators, bioreactors, purification systems and high-tech analytical platforms will be located alongside the NRC’s large-scale manufacturing capabilities, bringing together, on a single site, the key stages of the development pipeline: from design and process development to scale-up manufacturing, purification, analysis, formulation and packaging.
By bringing advanced equipment and complementary expertise together under one roof, the two partners are creating a national-scale platform in Montreal. This integrated infrastructure will shorten the time required to move from early-stage development to large-scale manufacturing, while also contributing to Canada’s ability to respond to future public health emergencies.
“From the outset, RampUp has been driven by a clear objective: to break down silos so that biomanufacturing is no longer carried out in isolation, but instead fully benefits from the expertise available at every stage of the innovation pipeline — from upstream research to downstream industrial applications,” explains Gregory De Crescenzo, Full Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal and RampUp Co-Director. “By consolidating our equipment at the NRC’s secure site, we are confident that we will be able to fulfill our mandate and bring into operation an agile platform that will enable us to respond rapidly when the next pandemic emerges.”
“The NRC’s mandate is to support innovation for the benefit of all Canadians,” says Kelley Parato, Director of Bioprocess Engineering at the NRC. “Through partnerships such as RampUp with Polytechnique Montréal, we are building strong and agile capabilities that address Canada’s priorities in health and biosafety.”
As part of its commitment to fostering long-term collaboration within Quebec’s and Canada’s biomanufacturing ecosystem, RampUp will also use this platform to support technology transfer, collaborative innovation and the development of processes aligned with the needs of its academic, government and industry partners.