This month has also been exciting for SmartCrys, with the publication of ‘The Digitalisation of the Crystallisation Process – a Holistic Control Strategy for Pharma 4.0’ in the September issue of Pharma Focus Asia. Kiran Ramisetty spearheaded this article, with Diarmuid Costello, Sean Costello, Luke Kiernan and Gareth Clarke contributing. The article outlines a method to gain new levels of control in the industrial crystallisation process through the advanced insight and process control offered by SmartCrys. This smart approach is set to revolutionise the pharma industry, and as a result,  we can expect more reliable, innovative and economical medication in the future.

It's definitely worth checking out! 

INDUSTRY 4.0

This quarter saw the beginning of our consultancy push. As a company, we have developed a strong pedigree of expert knowledge within the pharmaceutical industry over our 11-year history, and this is a service we are developing that will add value for companies who may not have the know-how to get up and running with all things Industry 4.0. We’re aiming to help as many companies as possible to reap rewards of transitioning to the factory of the future.  

It has been a very busy and successful summer for our Education team who have been processing applications and recruiting all around Ireland for our September/October programmes. Looking back to only a few months ago when we were granted 900 funded places, to now where we have over 2,790 applications submitted through Springboard alone – it’s a great result! We have also had over 1,000 enquiries through our website directly. This shows the strong credibility of our brand and how our hard work is paying off.

Over the last couple of weeks, our 24 HCI and Springboard funded programmes have all commenced across the regions with over 850 students starting this intake. Great team effort and hard work ensured our virtual recruitment ran as smooth as possible.

ONLINE EVENTS

This summer has, of course, been different compared to previous ones in that there were no physical job shows, company visits or open days to leverage our campaign. Our Programme Webinars have hugely helped to fill this gap for our recruitment campaign over Covid. These weekly/bi-weekly webinars have been run brilliantly by Ann Ryan with the help of Kevin Delaney and Michael King and have seen huge success over the last number of months. In total we will have hosted 12 webinars for our September/October programmes, with over 1,500 people registered and over 750 people attending these webinars over the summer. It's amazing to see such a high level of interest and activity online. As a result of this success, it is expected that these Webinars will continue to run post-Covid with the hope that they will be as successful in years to come! 

We had another very successful exam cycle in August 2020. All final exams again, were held in an online environment supported by the Innopharma Education team. 1,200 exam scripts were submitted. A total of 480 students sat exams in August 2020. 270 have fully completed their programmes and approx. 80 will continue on and complete in January 2021. 130 of these students were people who returned to repeat exams.  All the education team at Innopharma are very engaged with our students and actively encourage students to return and repeat modules where they have been unsuccessful the first time. It is one of our priorities to ensure that our students complete their academic programmes and achieve their qualifications as they set out to do. Many of these students will progress on to further studies with Innopharma.

GOOGLE REVIEWS 

As we are looking to increase the number of reviews on our Google Business page. It would be great if you could share the below link with students that you feel would have a positive experience to share. Thank you!

https://g.page/innopharma-education/review?rc

It is very important that we are all using our new branding across the board. Please check out our updated brand guidelines here. This folder contains all the materials you need to stay on brand. 

PRIVATE RECRUITMENT

It is great to see that even during these difficult times, the strength of our brand continues to grow and we are still building on our private numbers. Great work has been done to fill these places, particularly considering the large number of Springboard places given this year! Our brand is growing each year and with this, our good reputation within the industry. This is evident with the number of individuals and companies who are willing to fund our programmes privately. 

On the private side, we have 30 students starting our Honours Degree in Pharmaceutical Business Operations and 15 students progressing to Masters from our PG Dip in Pharmaceutical Business & Technology by completing their thesis. We also have 29 International Students starting with us this intake.

PHARMA INDUSTRY AWARDS 2020

We are proud to be sponsoring the Pharma Industry Awards 2020. Following from previous years, we are delighted to announce that we are sponsoring the ‘Partnership Alliance of the Year’ Award with the following companies in our category; Almac Discovery & Debiopharm International, NIBRT & Takeda and Ward Automation & MSD Ireland. The event has moved to 2021 following the current government guidelines but we look forward to gaining some more exposure as a result of this Sponsorship over the coming months.

THE REGIONAL TELEGRAPH - INNOPHARMA EDUCATION EDITION

It certainly has been a very busy summer with excellent outcomes with exam results and we have over 70  students progressing on to the next level across our programmes.   

We are also actively recruiting for L6 Pharma in Galway and Limerick  and the demand for these programmes is very strong. It was great to see these programmes fill up so quickly for September/October and as a result of this massive interest, there has been a great overflow into the 2021 courses. 

THE EU SKILLS AGENDA WEBINAR 2

In July, Innopharma hosted the second webinar of the series entitled “The EU skills agenda – Advancing Skills for Europe’s Recovery & Competitiveness”, following on from the first webinar on “ The New Industrial Strategy for Europe and prioritising Skills”.

The objective of this second webinar was to reflect on the June 8^th 2020 Council conclusions dedicated to advancing skills for Europe’s Recovery and Competitiveness and to discuss possible solutions and instruments to address this challenge.

We had some excellent speakers including the Bulgarian Minister for Education, National EU contact point for Italy, a former Head of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, Head of Technology Research Collaborations, South Africa and of course our esteemed colleagues – Finbarr and Orla!

This was a really excellent webinar talking about high-tech skills and the need for continued investment across Europe. Well done to everyone involved in organising.

You can watch the webinar on our website here. Definitely worth it!

TECHNICAL SERVICES UPDATES    

A BUSY Q3

Q3 has been an extremely busy time in the Technical Services division with the launch of our new website, 2 new starters and the recruitment for and commencement of both our QC and validation programmes, our 2nd and 13^th cohorts respectively.

NEWS

As mentioned in our last newsletter our Quality Control Analyst programme was badly affected by the Covid-19 restrictions.  We had just completed our inaugural programme when the virus arrived.  While our new QC Analysts were industry ready, recruitment of QC analysts across the industry was suddenly stalled.  Also, as this programme is almost exclusively hands-on training in the laboratory in Sandyford, we made the difficult decision to stall the programme.

It gives me great pleasure to report that we have now placed our first QC Analyst in industry and have recommenced our QC analyst training programme.  Shalini Thakur has taken up a role in the QC laboratory at BMS (meet Shalini in our New Starter section), and cohort 2 of our QC Analyst training programme has commenced training. 

It is a major milestone for Technical Services to have our first Analyst placed in industry and we look forward to many more placements of high-quality trained Analysts in the not too distant future.

The structures to deliver the training programme in our laboratory in Sandyford, in a safe manner, have been implemented.  This included devising a schedule and a laboratory layout structure that ensured government guidelines are adhered to at all times.  The training room beside the laboratory has been converted into a write-up area and the trainee analysts divide their time between the lab and the write-up area based on their activities throughout the day.  

Six science graduates have been recruited and have commenced the programme! 

NEW STARTERS

Shalini Thakur

Our first QC Analyst has been placed in industry.  Welcome on board Shalini.  Shalini holds a Bachelors of Pharmacy from The School of Pharmacy, Devi Ahilva University, in Indore, India and completed her Masters in Pharmaceutical Business & Technology with Innopharma Education & Griffith College.  Shalini has joined the separations lab in BMS Cruisrath, Dublin supporting product release. Shalini was also a winner in our recent Inno Bingo night. Well done Shalini!

Ewa Osinska

Ewa joins our QC Analyst programme supporting Irene with the programme delivery.  She is a Master’s qualified Engineer in Chemical Technology, from Technical University of Lodz, Poland and completed her Higher Diploma in Bio-Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Manufacturing, with Innopharma Education &  TU Dublin. Ewa is a familiar face already in Sandyford as she previously has completed both our Validation and Quality Control programmes. Welcome on board Ewa.

NEW VALIDATION PROGRAMME STARTED

As mentioned in our last newsletter we commenced a new validation programme on March 30^th with Cohort number 12.  This programme is being  exclusively on-line through both our training platform “Go to Training” and the Microsoft “Teams” platform.  Well done to Audrey and Caroline who modified content and structure accordingly in order to make the programme as practical as possible under the current climate. As restrictions ease, we will look for opportunities to bring the group into Sandyford to perform some executions.

Cohort 13 of our Validation programme started in July and are nearing the end of the programme. This was our largest programme to date with 13 participants.  The programme is being run mainly on-line through the Microsoft “Teams” platform.  However, the trainees also had the opportunity to visit Sandyford to participate in cleaning validation swabbing, process validation sampling and IOQ execution activities.  A number of interviews have taken place to date with prospective clients and we expect some placements soon. 

We said goodbye to Meabh McGuinness and Stephen O’Brien since our last newsletter. Best wishes to both in their future endeavours.

Our very own Technical Services website has been launched.  After a lot of hard work on design reviews, content generation, content revision, content uploading, etc it is a great achievement to bring this project to fruition.  Well done to all involved.  

Our Technical Services LinkedIn page was set up in February of this year and continues to grow with over 900 followers – our goal is to reach over 1000 by year-end.  Follow us for updates on activities and topics of interest within the BioPharmaceutical and MedTech industries.

TRINITY STUDENTS COMING ON BOARD

We are delighted to welcome 57 new Trinity students who will be coming on board the Innoskills platform this autumn. All of their invitations have been sent and they are ready to start working through the modules we have on the platform. We look forward to hearing how they get on over the next few months. 

If you spot any opportunities to introduce corporate pharma teams or potential customers, please get in touch with Ann to discuss. 

A VERY WARM WELCOME TO THE NEW STARTERS

Danielle O’Rourke - joining our team in Griffith College.

Danielle is a recent graduate of the Level 8 Biopharmaceutical and Medical Device Manufacturing course, which she started the day after her graduation from UCD with a BSc from the School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science. She was the class rep for her cohort and has recently started with Innopharma as the E-learning Instructional Designer. During her undergrad, she volunteered as a digital mentor to people in the community. Danielle was also working with the I.T. Department in UCD to help develop content, run courses & support sessions for lecturers & students on the new VLE which UCD had switched to. Danielle loves to read - super excited about the Innopharma Book Club, and loves to go bouldering. She says that everyone at Innopharma has been so welcoming, and she's looking forward to getting to know you all more!

See introduction above

BOOK CLUB

Our Social committee had a relatively quiet Q3 as all focus shifted to recruitment and repeat exams. However, our Innopharma Book/Film club is going strong with a number of meetings throughout Q3. So far, our highest rated book has been Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and our highest rated TV/Film is a draw between Get Out and The Peanut Butter Falcon. If you're interested in finding a good book and/or Show/Film, contact Mary Jane to join. 

INNO-BINGO!

The social events were back with a bang last week with a game of virtual INNO-BINGO! This was a great event and everyone had good fun. A huge thanks to Zivs for fantastic hosting and congratulations to Victoria and Danielle on winning a full house! Also, congratulations to our line winners: Luke, Shalini, Prosper, Michael, Darren and Audrey! Thanks to the social committee for organising the event and to Innopharma for sponsoring the prizes. Looking forward to next time... 

It was great to see that everyone took advantage of our Wellness day back in August. It was a lovely treat to see and appreciate all of the beautiful places Ireland has to offer. Thanks again to Innopharma for this great initiative. Congratulations to Darren for winning our photo competition, thanks to everyone who entered a photo. 
It is so important to take a break now and again and switch off - which can be hard when working from home. We underestimate how good some fresh air is for us, so make sure to take some time to get outside and enjoy a nice walk, run, cycle or any other activity you enjoy!