The University of Strathclyde's academic research centre for pharmaceutical manufacturing and digital CMC, CMAC, has announced the adoption of Plvs Ultra, an Enterprise Intelligence Engine that uses knowledge graph technology to link disconnected data systems.
This allows research teams to ask complex questions and receive real-time answers, streamlining data access.
With a decade of accumulated knowledge, CMAC is now poised to accelerate the development of new medicines and processes by connecting previously siloed data systems.
Why this matters
The new deployment addresses persistent inefficiencies in the pharmaceutical sector, particularly in the chemistry, manufacturing and controls phase, where processes transition from laboratory to commercial manufacturing.
Each new molecule is treated as a fresh start, requiring repeated problem-solving that incurs significant costs in time and resources.
In manufacturing, poor quality can account for 25-40% of total sales revenue, while delays in investigations can postpone regulatory filings by up to 12 months.
CMAC's research spans early Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) to commercial-ready settings and includes the recent launch of Open CMC, a strategic spin-out designed to enhance innovation toward commercial readiness.
Through a precompetitive membership model, CMAC brings together leading pharmaceutical companies to tackle shared challenges.
Overall, the Plvs Ultra deployment enables CMAC to effectively manage and connect research and manufacturing data, allowing for complex queries and timely insights across its entire data estate.
Alastair Florence, Professor of 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 serves as a key component of CMAC's ambitious £33m UK-RPIF CMAC Data Lab.
This initiative aims to create a "Lab of the Future" that will serve as an industry-wide test bed for digital continuous manufacturing and process control (CMC).
The goal is to place data intelligence infrastructure at the centre of pharmaceutical manufacturing in the UK.
Patrick Hyett, CEO and co-founder of Plvs Ultra, added: "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 and pre-built pharmaceutical ontologies to connect data across systems, creating an intelligence layer that enables real-time queries without disrupting existing operations.
It turns compliance data into a resource for decision-making and can be implemented within 12 weeks, compared to the years it takes for traditional projects.
The CMAC deployment showcases that the shift from fragmented pharmaceutical data operations to connected, intelligent systems is already happening.