Northwest Biotech 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 achiety 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!....
