RICHMOND, Va. — Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly's recent announcement of a $5 billion plant coming to Goochland County surprised many Virginians. But for two Virginia Commonwealth University professors, this development has been years in the making.
VCU is the only university in the country with a doctoral program for pharmaceutical engineering, a fact that positioned it as a natural workforce pipeline for Eli Lilly.
"Partnering with the school of engineering and the school of pharmacy and thinking about how do we create a workforce that's needed to support companies like Lilly is part and partial why we partnered together," Kelechi Ogbonna, the dean of VCU's School of Pharmacy, said.
Both Ogbonna and Frank Gupton, the chair of VCU's Chemical Engineering Department, have been instrumental in developing programs that align with pharmaceutical industry needs.
“It basically showed a proof of concept of what we could do in central Virginia,” Gupton said. “It basically showed a proof of concept of what we could do in central Virginia so in partnering with Ogbonna and his department, we’ve been able to show an end-to-end capability to be able to work on making active ingredients as well as a formulated product.”
In 2020, Gupton says the university received a grant from the federal Government to build the capability to produce active ingredients for pharmaceutical drugs and their starting materials which in large part were bing produced overseas.
“When you start thinking about the magnitude of the problem that we’re dealing with, there are all kinds of opportunities that can be created to be a able to re-onshore not just the pharma part of it, but the precursors to those products that are going to require us to think differently about how we produce these materials in the United States versus overseas,” Gupton said.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin highlighted this unique educational advantage during the investment announcement.
"In collaboration with our community colleges to develop a manufacturing degree for pharmaceuticals, and in VCU, we have something very unique in America in that we had PhD program for pharmaceuticals," Youngkin said.
The partnership between VCU's engineering and pharmacy schools began by asking pharmaceutical companies what they needed in future employees.
"What is needed to build the skilled workforce for tomorrow?" Ogbonna said. "And what they described is, we have folks with pharmaceutical backgrounds, we have folks with engineering backgrounds, but wouldn't it be pretty special if we could combine those things in their education, give them real-world experience while they're in their educational programs so that when they get out, they're ready to hit the ground running."
Eli Lilly's new manufacturing facility will specialize in antibody conjugates — treatments specifically designed to target and destroy cancerous cells. This aligns with research already underway in VCU's chemical engineering school, where Gupton oversees a state-of-the-art lab developing treatments for debilitating diseases.
Across campus, Ogbonna leads the School of Pharmacy's efforts to apply the research in the chemical engineering school in real-world settings, supported by the university's sterile compounding lab — the only one of its kind at a U.S. university.
"We have all of the pieces and parts, the skills, the expertise, tremendous faculty, students that want to learn differently," Ogbonna explained. "But also want to be able to make an impact in a meaningful way."
From an academic standpoint, Ogbonna says VCU isn’t just looking at how to prepare its students for these high skilled drug manufacturing jobs making their way to Central Virginia, but also providing multiple access points for students to get into pharmacy and engineering fields.
The Dean of Pharmacy says conversations are currently underway within the Community College system with schools like Brightpoint and Reynolds to help foster pharmacy and engineering concentrations within their certificate and associate programs.
“For us it’s not just the PhD in pharmaceutical engineering, the first of its kind in the country, we’ve also launched a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical sciences,” Ogbonna said. “We’re thinking about the entire ecosystem; undergraduate education, credential, stackable, micro-credentials all the way through the PhD program to make sure we’re thinking about the workforce at every aspect of what might be needed not just today, but also tomorrow.
"This is a really great opportunity for us to be able to reimagine what K-12 could look like for students who will hopefully go through the program,” Gupton said.
The innovations aren’t just happening at VCU. Gupton says the University of Virginia Manning Center is also conducting research with biologics that go hand-in-hand with VCU’s molecular research.
Ogbonna predicts Virginia will become the "epicenter" for creating similar partnerships.
“The worse thing that could happen is that they build this facility and they can’t operate them because they don’t have the skill sets to be able to do it. That’s why we’re here," Gupton said. “Within this small area, we've got a lot of the capabilities to do everything that Lilly is looking to support.”
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