Life Sciences

Life science facilities are heavily regulated and are required to meet stringent government, environmental and international standards requiring specific conditions for clean rooms, wet labs and production facilities and other life science spaces.

Trends and challenges driving life sciences – adaptive manufacturing

Demand for labs, manufacturing plants, research, and development (R&D) facilities and other life science facilities is increasing as the life sciences industry continues to flourish. The current fast paced innovation in life sciences is expected to continue to expand, which will present opportunities and challenges for the industry.

Life science facilities are heavily regulated and are required to meet stringent government, environmental and international standards requiring specific conditions for clean rooms, wet labs and production facilities and other life science spaces.

New scientific discoveries and progress within the life science industry has led to greater flux within the manufacturing process. Life science facilities require extremely high standards of ventilation, climate control, energy efficiency, safety, and adaptability. In addition, senior executives and R&D teams require spaces where they can collaborate and work, which requires transparent and movable spaces.

The industry is placing greater emphasis upon adaptability and flexibility moving from the traditional dedicated manufacturing plant to a life science facility that is designed and built to manufacture multiple products. The new life science manufacturing facilities need to be able to adapt swiftly to shifts in new technology, ground-breaking discoveries, and changes in demand.

Handling the biotech explosion

The way in which life science facilities are scoped, scheduled, and budgeted has altered due to disruptions to the supply chains with shortages in essential building materials such as stainless steel, glass, and wood, including equipment and tools, all adversely impacting the construction and renovation of life science facilities.

In the current climate, with the rapid growth in life sciences, companies are finding it difficult to find sufficient lab space, prompting the industry to build standard spec suites, or move in ready labs, facilitating companies to commence their R&D quickly, instead of waiting for a specific build to suit solution.

We assist with repurposing existing buildings, which provides the added benefit of both time and cost savings. Many of these facilities are occupied during construction, making the renovation and build process more challenging, with the necessity to limit disruption to production operations.

We employ a collaborative approach in the construction of life science facilities, ensuring that the production facilities will be able to function into the future as the industry evolves. We seek to meet the challenges of expanding, retrofitting, or building new facilities, while understanding our clients operating needs and evolving business priorities.

In the past, the design of life science facilities followed a straight line from the process flow diagram with the building layout following the process, today the life science facilities must be designed and built to accommodate the unknown.

Todays, life science facilities must consider factors such as research pipelines, business objectives, emerging technologies, and risk management to ensure that their new facilities can provide flexibility, scalability, and agility.

From project inception we provide proactive programme management facilitating our clients to make timely informed decisions to technically complex challenges, while controlling cost, and driving innovation and optimisation.