10 Feb SGS Vitrology Glasgow

SGS played a pivotal role during the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting with vaccine early development, scale-up and mass production role out in 2021-22. This ensured our society, our nation, and the entire world population was fast tracked to receive ground-breaking vaccine and protection, without delay to other biologic medicine release testing.  SGS Global Biosafety Centre of Excellence in Glasgow, UK is nominated for an award in Scotland Life Science Industry for showing high levels of leadership, ambition, and entrepreneurship to commit to such an endeavour.

SGS Vitrology in Glasgow provides testing support for the biosafety and characterisation of manufacturing cell substrates, virus seeds, bioreactor harvests, and drug substance for all biopharmaceuticals, advanced therapies, and viral vaccines, including SARS CoV-2.

During February 2020, SGS led in the race for the covid-19 vaccine and provided rapid and safe testing strategy that delivered a testing schedule that allowed first clinical trial batch testing of AZD1222 for use in 500 humans during early April 2020. SGS used advanced validated nucleic acid techniques on the pre-master virus seed including the first clinical batch of ChAdOX1 n-CoV-19. Additionally, we fast-tracked batches to reach 12,000+ doses for Phase I/II/II clinical trial by mid-2020.

SGS made a commitment to provide high financial investment, capacity, and business leadership to allow the Oxford vaccine to enter the market as a front runner in Dec-2020. With over 30 years of expertise and knowledge in novel vaccine testing industry, this already globally renowned team supported Oxford University and subsequently COVID Vaccine AstraZeneca (AZD 1222) and others from commercial launch and then went on to mass production and batch release during 2021-22.

This required the upscaling of our business, that saw SGS Vitrology Glasgow secure an investment of £10 million which increased our lab capacity and headcount by 35 employees, ready to support the demand to provide vaccines in an unprecedented national effort. The end of 2020 saw SGS release 36 pre-clinical batches of the Oxford/AZ Vaccine, and invest a further £7M and 30 employees to offer GMP lot release of >40 batches per month (with complex testing solutions on the viral bioreactor harvests, control cells, drug substance, and final drug product on over 200 commercial batches in 2021 with >90% on-time-delivery.

By the end of 2021, SGS in Glasgow had tested and certified hundreds of vaccine batches, which equated to over 3 billion doses of the 9 billion given to the world population by the Oxford/AZ consortium and associated manufactures. Being part of this global consortium allowed SGS to promote growth in other markets as the international strategy required manufacturing and testing across companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.

The investment and expansion project began in March 2020 and was completed in mid-2021, adding >550m2 and 16 BSL-2 laboratories to our facility. It is now staffed with 150 expert employees and demonstrates our continued support in the development of biopharmaceutical products and our commitment to accelerated global health solutions.