Let's begin with Education

Our September 2019 courses have now all begun with over 600 springboard students starting across Dublin, Cork and Limerick compared to 400 students for the same time last year. We also had 90 international students starting in Griffith College this semester which is a 50% increase on last year.

It has been a busy few months leading up to our September 19 intake with several open evenings, drop-in sessions, events, webinars & interviews etc. to get all of the students on board. We had our highest ever turn out at our open evenings!

Back in June, the Education Team got together for a day filled with brainstorming, revising the student process & experience and of course Zoho! It was a fantastic day to get everyone together before our September 2019 campaign kicked off.

The exciting projects that begun last quarter in Education are now complete!  Our new website is now live and active and is bringing in several enquiries every day which are going straight on to Zoho CRM. It is great to see the benefits of the linkage with Zoho.

The brand has undergone a refresh and can be seen across our new sales & marketing materials including our new collection of course brochures. More marketing material such as new slide-decks, pull up banners and templates under the new branding is still in process and will be ready for use very soon.

The DSP’s ‘National Employer Roadshow’ was held in Limerick on the 16^th September to address the skill gap in Ireland. Mary Jo presented along with a past student, Eoin Rafferty and General Manager at SSE, Sean Glynn.

The Galway Jobs Expo was a great success last Saturday, the 21st of September. Mary Jo & Fiona attended on behalf of the Education & Validation divisions and they got a fantastic turnout. Mary Jo spoke about upskilling for free to work in the medical device sector in Galway and Fiona talked about why you should you consider a career in Validation. 

To finish off our first semester of the year, we had our Innopharma Graduation in May which was a very successful night. With a great turnout on the evening, our graduates enjoyed some snacks and refreshments as they were presented with their certificates of completion and caught up with classmates and staff.

I am sure you have noticed our fantastic new functional surfaces including the interactive walls on the ground, second and third floor as well as the table in the Lonsdale room. It's great to see them all in use and the benefits of having a much more creative space throughout the building for both teaching purposes and internal meetings. A huge thank you again to everyone for their patience while the work was being done.

Back in July, some of our students had a fantastic experience where they received a site tour of the Boston Scientific plant in Cork. They particularly found the walk-through of the corridor hugely beneficial as it brought a lot of their learning together. 

IBEC & Innopharma Pharma 4.0 Event 

On the 4th of December, we will be running a pharma industry event co-hosted by ourselves and IBEC. The day will be broken into two, the first part will be a discussion workshop held in the Alex hotel followed by an afternoon session whereby there will be a panel discussion and some top industry speakers, academics and potentially a government minister will say a few words. The main themes will be about how the Irish Pharma industry needs to upskill and invest to ensure we have the talent and knowledge to embrace the increase adaption of technology in (bio)pharma manufacturing. This will be a great opportunity for our brand to position ourselves as a leading science faculty for the Pharma industry. Eve will update on plans when finalised. 

In July, our Technology division published our latest research paper demonstrating the capabilities of our newest technology Smart FBx, which was used in the development and implementation of a self-guided granulation process. The release of this paper positions the company firmly within the Pharma 4.0 space. Innopharma is no longer just a PAT company!

At the conference Gareth presented a poster titled “Strategies for Overcoming Window Fouling during In-Line Real-Time Monitoring of Fluid Bed Granulation” presenting on some of the developments we have made over the past number of years in successfully applying different sensor types to the granulation process in our process lab. Chris also presented a poster titled “Examination of the Physical and Performance Effects of 2 Different Control Models on Scale-Up of an Enteric Wurster Coating Process” covering some of the results of a very extensive study undertaken over the last year in conjunction with industry heavyweights Colorcon and Glatt. As you can tell we pride ourselves on our snappy poster titles in the Technology division!

The Eyecon₂ was also on display in the exhibition hall, kindly hosted by our friends Magi Richter and Anja Geissler-Fichtner of Thermo Fischer Scientific’s Pharmaceutical Extrusion division. It was presented mounted to their lab-scale twin screw extruder / granulator with a newly designed prototype material presentation interface, which has already seen it’s first commercial use since then! This underscores the value that process analytical technologies can provide when fully integrated with development and manufacturing equipment, both enabling greater understanding and faster development of processes through reducing or removing the need for time-consuming offline analysis of samples. This is something we may be hearing a lot more about in the future, but you’ll have to wait until the next newsletter for that!

The New Analytical Lab 

We are in the process of converting a portion of training room 3 into an Analytical Laboratory with fully finished product release testing capabilities. This expansion of facilities is required for the new project called SmartCrys. The SmartCrys is an EU funded project on API crystallization process control. A distinct analytical lab is getting ready to fit the brand-new facilities such as waters HPLC, USP standard dissolution apparatus and a crystallizer assembly along with temperature controller. These facilities are standardizing to work in a GLP environment considering all health and safety regulations. Innopharma is targeting to bring many other new facilities to improve the quality of pharmaceutical & biopharmaceutical research and education.  The lab will be fully operational in October. See images for progress to date.

And Some Great News from Technical Services

Our Technical Services Business continues to grow as we have welcomed several new members to our team over the last few months.  Caroline has come on board as our Business relationship Manager and is working closely with Fiona to grow the business.  Katy has joined Noreen and Meabh at Regeneron in their QA function. Tom has joined Joe and Pedro at Amgen in their packaging validation area and Emer is our first team member to take up a position at Mallinckrodt supporting their data integrity project within their Quality function.

Cohort 9 have just completed our programme and are interviewing at the moment (two have just received job offers and will be commencing in the coming weeks). Cohort 10 have just commenced the programme. 

On the utility of broad interests for career success, Fiona and Caroline would like to recommend a book called “Range” by David Epstein – it explores why generalists triumph in an increasingly specialised world. Available on Audible.

Quality Control Analysts

We plan to launch a similar programme to our Validation offering, for Quality Control Analysts in Q4. The programme itself is aimed at science graduates and will provide hands-on experience of performing finished product release testing.

We are delighted to have Sandra Mooney back working with us with the Education team. Sandra very successfully managed the Galway programmes for several years. She most recently held the position of head of HR for Creganna and has great experience in the Pharma & Medtech industries.

Caroline Fanneran joined our Technical Services Team in May as Business Relationship Manager, job sharing with Fiona Fennell. A native of Co Clare, Caroline now resides in Sligo.  Caroline has a lengthy career in business development within FMCG, Supply Chain and Staffing & Recruitment. Before joining Innopharma, Caroline worked with CREGG Recruitment as Divisional Manager, specialising in Science, Technical & Engineering Recruitment for the Life Sciences Sector. She is delighted to be part of the Innopharma team and really appreciates how welcome everyone has made her feel.

Kirankumar Ramisetty just started with our Technology team as a Crystallization Research Fellow. Previously, Kiran was a postdoc from SSPC, University of Limerick in Prof. Ake Rasmuson group. He did a PhD in Chemical Engineering from ICT-Mumai India. Currently, he is engaged in setting up a new analytical lab and introducing new technologies to Innopharma.  

Moumita Banik (call her Mou) joined our Technology team back in July. Before starting in Innopharma she was lost in an intense MSc course in Digital Marketing Strategy at Trinity Business school. At the same time, She was working as a Digital Communicator, helping Trinity go digital. And prior to that, she was in Kolkata working on CRM, doing another master’s and volunteering for 3 NGO’s at home and abroad. Mou loves to travel, hike, meet people, acquire new skills and of course to eat!

Claude Lacey recently started with our Technology team, taking on the role of principle architect and managing the software team.  Claude recently completed the Post Graduate Diploma in Pharmaceutical Business and Technology with us.  His previous experience includes working with Digital Pathology Technologies. Apart from having an interest in all thing’s techie, Claude also enjoys hiking, mountain biking and brewing his own beer!