UD’s STAR Campus gears up for a major addition in biopharma

A little over two years after funding was announced, the new biopharmaceutical center at the University of Delaware’s STAR Campus will break ground next week.

The campus — whose name stands for Science, Technology and Advanced Research — combines academics with industry and community partnerships. It’s the home of UD’s Tower at STAR, the Fintech Innovation Hub, Ammon Pinizzotto Biopharmaceutical Innovation Center and the Chemours Discovery Hub. Soon, the SABRE Center will live there, too.

It will allow for an expansion of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL), which currently has space at the Ammon Pinizzotto Center.

NIIMBL received $8 million in federal government earmarks to begin designs for a new center, the Delaware Business Times reported in March. The money was part of $97 million in the first federal earmark funding in nearly a decade, obtained by US Sens. Tom Carper and Chris Coon and US Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who, with other Congressional Democrats, helped re-establish the practice for earmarks, aka non-competitive discretionary spending on local projects.

As part of preparing for future public health emergencies, NIIMBL and UD made plans to build a Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) facility to support biopharmaceutical innovation for clinical research.

The facility was announced as the SABRE Center in September 2022, with plans to build it on a lot on the 274-acre STAR Campus — formerly the Newark Chrysler plant —  just north of the Ammon Pinizzotto Center. SABRE stands for Securing American Bio-Manufacturing Research and Education.

Once completed, the SABRE Center will be used for biopharmaceutical testing and training highly skilled workers for the industry.

The groundbreaking takes place April 22 at 10 a.m.

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This article has been updated to clarify that NIIMBL is expanding into the new space.