ARMI Creates Pandemic Roadmap

The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) in Manchester recently launched a new roadmap—the National Technology Roadmap for Pandemic Response and Recovery—that outlines a technology-based action plan for strengthening and accelerating U.S. pandemic response and preparedness.

The National Technology Roadmap for Pandemic Response and Recovery is the first pandemic roadmap driven by the manufacturing sector. Given that the manufacturing sector will be at the center of a stronger, faster, and more coordinated U.S. response to and recovery from COVID-19 and future pandemics, this roadmap will help ensure U.S. preparedness and resiliency.

The roadmap outlines ways to improve America’s response through investment in technologies, platforms, and infrastructure improvements in six key technical focus areas

• Supply Chains — to ensure access to all raw materials and components needed for manufacturing
• Manufacturing — to meet demands for PPE, medical devices, therapeutics, and vaccines both rapidly and flexibly
• Deployment and Access — to ensure products and support are available when and where they are needed most
• Data Infrastructure — to help inform public health response decisions
• Predictive Capabilities — to enhance early detection and tracing, prediction of new outbreaks, prediction of prognosis, drug development, and vaccine design
• Regulatory Processes — to facilitate the accelerated approval of safe and effective medical products critical to pandemic response

The roadmap recommends specific technology development and commercialization efforts that can be implemented immediately to respond to and recover from COVID-19, as well as longer-term research and development priorities necessary to improve readiness.

To develop this national initiative, ARMI drew upon input from more than 75 multidisciplinary experts and senior leaders from the frontlines of pandemic response, representing academia, government, manufacturers, healthcare, supply chain, data infrastructure, biosecurity, professional societies, and consortia.

“The priorities and recommendations in the roadmap reflect the consensus of experts who have been working tirelessly throughout this pandemic,” said Richard McFarland, Chief Regulatory Officer at ARMI/BioFabUSA. “This is an invaluable resource not only for industry but also for Congress and the Administration. COVID-19 demonstrated how critical sustained pandemic planning is—and how important it will be to align public- and private-sector priorities to ensure sustained pandemic preparedness in the future.”

“We are eager to begin working collaboratively across all levels of the public and private sectors to implement the strategies in the roadmap,” said Tom Bollenbach, chief technology office for ARMI/BioFabUSA. “Together we can create and maintain a strong national defense against future pandemics.”

ARMI, a non-profit organization located in Manchester, NH, leads BioFabUSA, a DoD-sponsored Manufacturing USA Institute. ARMI/BioFabUSA is a member-based, public-private partnership dedicated to the advanced biomanufacturing and commercialization of cells, tissues, and tissue-related technologies, developing a robust supply chain to support biomanufacturing, and creating a ready and trained workforce for biomanufacturing. ARMI/BioFabUSA and its members sit at the nexus of sectors involved in COVID-19 response and recovery—including healthcare, manufacturing, biosecurity, and government.