Bionow

History

The Industrial Revolution - started in the late eighteenth century in Northwest England. The textile industry begat the dye industry. The dye industry developed into chemicals and, later, the pharmaceuticals industry in the region.

1824 - Establishment of University of Manchester - the 1st 'Red Brick University'
1856 - First synthetic dye by Sir William Henry Perkin, whose dye company ultimately became ICI and AstraZeneca
1881 - Establishment of University of Liverpool
1898 - Founding of the World's first School of Tropical Medicine (Liverpool)
1902 - Sir Ronald Ross - first Briton to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine (Liverpool)
1948 - Distillers Company - penicillin produced on a large scale after the second world war (Speke, Liverpool)
1962 - Sir John Charnley - pioneer in human joint replacements (Manchester)
1982 - Lilly - the first commercial manufacture of recombinant DNA product, insulin (Speke, Liverpool)
1988 - Sir James Black - Nobel Prize in Medicine for the development of beta blockers during 1958-64 (Alderley Park, Cheshire)
1999 - Opening of Europe's 1st Campus based biotechnology incubator (Manchester)
2000 - Medeva - first company to take biologic product (HepacareTM) through European regulatory system (Speke, Liverpool)
2000 - Launch of the biotech cluster support initiative, Bionow
2003 - NW becomes the number 1 exporter of pharmaceuticals in the UK (£3.8 Billion)
2004 - Manchester becomes home to the UK Biobank, the largest project of its kind in the world to study the effect of genetic and environmental factors on human health
2005 - The University of Manchester and UMIST merge to become the UK's largest University, with 50% of it's research activity in Life Sciences and Medicine
2006 - The National Biomanufacturing Centre opens for business (Speke, Liverpool)
2007 - Renovo, a spin out from the University of Manchester, becomes the UK's largest biotech company by market cap and employee numbers
2008 - The Northwest was the only region to secure both a competitive and specialised (microbial diseases) NIHR Biomedical Research Centres.

The Future? Watch this space!....