The importance of the building extension project was underlined during the festivity by seven celebrant speakers.
After a welcome by Ildikó Terebesi (managing director of INVITE GmbH), Andreas Pinkwart (Minister of Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization & Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) exemplified the high importance of world-class research and scientific education for the pharmaceutical industry, as well as collaboration in scientific-industrial partnerships. “We need to further invest in best education, best research and technologies and we must bring science and industry even closer together…”, Minister Pinkwart said, and further: “…it´s decisive to merge the strengths and that´s what you are doing in the DDIC.”
The representatives of the INVITE shareholder assembly, Armin Knors (Bayer), Gerhard Schembecker (Technical University Dortmund), Martin Goch (Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf), as well as Silke Gotthardt (chairwoman of the INVITE-supervisory board) pointed on the DDIC as a great example of an industrial-academic collaboration. They emphasized the importance of the building extension project with new lab space for further strengthening and driving research and innovation in the areas of formulation technology and drug delivery within the DDIC.
Werner Hoheisel (DDIC operations director) and David Bors (project management) gave insight into the relevance of the project for the ongoing and future DDIC activities as well as the project status and the next major milestones.
The new building will be home to the Drug Delivery Innovation Center (DDIC), a consortium for pre-competitive research in drug delivery and formulation technology led by INVITE. In the consortium, partners from the pharmaceutical industry, such as Merck, UCB, Janssen and Bayer, work closely together with the academic partners. With the new building, the researchers of the DDIC will be able to work together at one location in a state-of-the-art laboratory environment, which is the best starting point for cutting-edge research.
The new building will be integrated into the existing building of INVITE and completed in early 2023. By then the new building part will add 1200 m2 of laboratory and offices space. The construction project has a budget of approximately €6 million and is supported by the EFRE (Europäischer Fonds für regionale Entwicklung) program.
The DDIC was founded in 2017 and the pharmaceutical companies Bayer AG, Merck KGaA (all Germany), Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. and UCB S.A (all Belgium) together with the university partners TU Dortmund and HHU Düsseldorf form the core of the consortium which is led by INVITE GmbH. The DDIC fosters international, multi-disciplinary networks in the research area of drug delivery and manufacturing, it promotes pharmaceutical science in close collaboration with academia and pharmaceutical industry along the value chain.