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A simulated “clean room” has debuted at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to provide lab training to city residents starting careers in pharmaceutical manufacturing — including some who don’t have college degrees.
The room is a project of Kaazi, a new firm launched by Orchestra Life Sciences. It aims to cater to companies like Johnson & Johnson, Merck and TerraPower Isotopes that are eager to develop the next generation of cancer treatments and other drugs but need help finding thousands of workers trained in highly specific manufacturing processes.
Orchestra partner Sumit Verma said there’s excitement in the industry about potentially transformative new treatments for melanoma, certain breast cancers and other conditions, but schools and existing training programs lack the facilities and instructor expertise to teach workers how to make those products.
“You’re looking at first-of-a-kind treatments, whether it is nuclear medicine, cell and gene therapy, mRNA, biologics,” Verma said at a ribbon-cutting Monday afternoon for the new facility. “The question would be: who’s going to produce these once they get past phase 3 clinical trials? So that’s where the challenge is in terms of subject matter expertise.”
Company executives also described Kaazi as a way to expand economic opportunity in a city with high unemployment and a need for more paths to good-paying jobs.
Some trainee cohorts will be required to have associate’s or bachelor’s degrees in life sciences, while others will just need to have taken basic high school and chemistry classes.
“With initiatives like Kaazi, we can lead the way in how these medicines are manufactured, and develop the workforce that makes that possible,” Orchestra CEO Emilie Pelletier said. “When we build the future of medicine in Philadelphia, we should be building careers for Philadelphians.”
Orchestra, which relocated its headquarters to Philadelphia from Montreal a year ago, is a technical consultancy that helps drugmakers set up and run factories that make advanced therapies.
