UK's leading pharmaceutical manufacturing research centre unlocks a decade of data to accelerate medicines development

CMAC, led by the University of Strathclyde, the UK’s foremost academic research centre for pharmaceutical manufacturing and digital CMC, can now draw on a decade of accumulated manufacturing knowledge. This will accelerate the development of new medicines and processes, connecting data across multiple interconnected systems that were previously impossible to interrogate together.

CMAC invested in the capability delivered by Plvs Ultra, an Enterprise Intelligence Engine that uses knowledge graph technology to create semantic connections across previously disconnected data systems. Research teams can ask complex questions of their entire data estate and get answers in real time, rather than manually hunting across multiple, siloed systems. 

The deployment addresses one of the pharmaceutical sector’s most persistent inefficiencies. Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls is the phase where processes are scaled from laboratory to commercial manufacturing and remains heavily manual across the industry. 

Each new molecule that enters the scale-up pipeline is treated as a fresh start: the manufacturing processes that will take it from laboratory to commercial production cannot draw on knowledge from previous work, meaning the same challenges have to be solved again and again, at significant cost in time and resource. 

In Manufacturing, when deviations occur, poor quality represents 25–40% of total sales revenue, while investigation delays can set back regulatory filings by up to 12 months and trap millions of pounds worth of medicines in warehouses.

CMAC’s research spans from early TRL to commercial-ready settings, coupled with its strong track record in its translation to industry activities, which includes the recent launch of its new strategic spin-out Open CMC™, which is designed to scale CMAC’s innovation portfolio toward full commercial readiness. Through its precompetitive membership model, CMAC brings together the industry’s leading pharmaceutical companies to tackle shared manufacturing and regulatory science challenges with insights and solutions flowing directly back into their operations.

The Plvs Ultra deployment follows CMAC’s decision to acquire a knowledge graph approach to managing and connecting its research and manufacturing data, a methodology that enables the centre to develop complex, ontology-based queries across previously disconnected data sources, allowing research teams to ask questions of their entire data estate and get answers in real time. 

Professor Alastair Florence is a Distinguished Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Strathclyde and Director of CMAC said: “As we undertake increasingly ambitious research projects for our pharma members and with our academic and technology partners, it is essential that we can manage complex, multi-source data while leveraging decades of accumulated expertise. As part of CMAC’s Quality by Digital Design (QbDD) strategic approach, building our CMC Development Knowledge Graph using Plvs Ultra’s solution enables us to develop the ontologies and semantic tools necessary to interrogate and connect manufacturing data across multiple interconnected systems.”

The initial deployment is a foundational element of CMAC’s ambitious £33M UK-RPIF CMAC Data Lab that is building a Lab of the Future as an industry-wide test bed for digital CMC that will place data intelligence infrastructure at the heart of UK pharmaceutical manufacturing. 

Patrick Hyett, CEO and co-founder of Plvs Ultra, said: “CMAC is doing work that the pharmaceutical industry depends on. The complexity of connecting and interrogating years of manufacturing science data across continuous processes, chemistry, and scale-up is exactly the kind of challenge our platform was built to solve. Without the ability to semantically connect that data, the complexity becomes a barrier, one that manual processes and conventional data tools simply cannot overcome.”

Plvs Ultra’s Enterprise Intelligence Engine uses semantic layering technology and pre-built pharmaceutical ontologies to connect data across systems, creating an intelligence layer above existing infrastructure that enables real-time, cross-system queries without replacing or disrupting current operations. The platform transforms data from a compliance documentation requirement into an active resource for decision-making. Implementation is delivered within 12 weeks, compared with traditional enterprise data projects that can take years.

For Plvs Ultra, the CMAC deployment is the latest evidence that the shift from manual, fragmented pharmaceutical data operations to connected, intelligent systems is no longer a future ambition. It’s already happening.