Landmark Bio, a biomanufacturing facility co-founded by MIT, breaks ground in Watertown Arsenal

On July 29, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and Affiliate Provost Krystyn Van Vliet attended a groundbreaking ceremony to rejoice the design of Landmark Bio, a new 40,000-square foot biopharma producing facility at The Arsenal on the Charles in Watertown, Massachusetts. Jongyoon Han, MIT professor of electrical engineering and organic engineering, and Richard D. Braatz, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, faculty investigate officer, and professor of chemical engineering at MIT also attended the event.

Landmark Bio emerged from a community-non-public partnership shaped in 2019 among MIT and 4 founding associates: Harvard University, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, Cytiva, and Alexandria True Estate Equities.

The facility — which will house producing and improvement areas less than the same roof — is open up to MIT school and their study teams conducting investigation to advance cell-centered and RNA-based mostly therapies for hard conditions these kinds of as most cancers, as properly as for regenerative medication. Landmark Bio’s mission is to advance and remove obstacles to producing systems whilst serving as a forum for workforce improvement offered to workers in Massachusetts and outside of.

“With this collaboration between academia, industry, and government, we have a collective opportunity to advance the technologies that manufacture and distribute new and next-generation medications by incubating and analyzing the details at the rear of all those systems,” says Schmidt. “MIT is proud to engage in a purpose in the enhancement of new technologies to make, evaluate, and review new medicines greater than we can right now.”

For MIT, the partnership will hook up to the Institute’s ongoing state-of-the-art producing workforce growth initiatives which includes a hands-on cell therapy manufacturing providing piloted this earlier spring at MIT. Van Vliet led the improvement of a study course to prepare personnel pursuing occupations in superior biomanufacturing in Larger Boston-Cambridge and beyond. Additional than 2,000 college students in the United States and from 90 other countries enrolled in the initially on line giving.

“This features MIT’s Heart for Biomedical Innovation as perfectly as on the net courses and palms-on training to permit reskilling and upskilling of tomorrow’s producing workforce. Numerous roles are essential to make these upcoming-generation medications achieve far more sufferers,” claims Van Vliet.

A community-personal collaboration, Landmark Bio husband or wife members include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Heart, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Medical center, the Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute, Massachusetts General Healthcare facility, and the Massachusetts Existence Sciences Centre.

“The partnership encourages cross-sector collaborations to accelerate innovation and strengthen the foremost placement of the Commonwealth in the daily life sciences,” states Ran Zheng, Landmark Bio’s chief government officer. “One of the initiatives we are collaborating on is workforce progress. With MIT’s world-class method to educating and studying and Landmark Bio’s slicing-edge process development and biomanufacturing facility, we believe that we can offer an immersive finding out practical experience to a various pool of expertise, help deal with the workforce shortage in novel modality enhancement and producing, and enable the progress of the daily life sciences sector.”

Every of the founding associates invested in the construction and operations of the facility, which is slated to open in 2022.