2012 Facility of the Year Awards category winners announced

Published: 26-Jan-2012

Six manufacturing facilities are recognised

Five pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in Italy, India, the US, and two in Germany, have won category awards in the annual Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA). A sixth greenfield facility in Ireland received special recognition for novel collaboration.

Roche Diagnostics is the Category Winner for Operational Excellence at its biotechnology site in Penzberg, Germany, where it set out to double its capacity for early research and development of therapeutic proteins. This was made possible without new construction.

The ‘TP Expand project’ was the result of an innovative master plan featuring six independent projects and a GMP IT system known as DAMAS, which handles 133 pilot plant systems, 260 simultaneous users, 954 analytical devices, and 700,000 samples each year, eliminates manual data entry and provides a shared knowledge base.

Rentschler Biotechnologie is the Category Winner for Equipment Innovation for its REX III project in Laupheim, Germany.

Rentschler, a global contract manufacturer, designed and built its REX III project to host multiple products and achieve maximum flexibility. The 9,800ft2 facility has an annual capacity of 10 manufacturing projects with up to 24 batches at 1,000 L scale.

The new facility features a flexible space concept comprising four independent, connectable all-purpose cleanrooms designed for the operation of 100% mobile, single use manufacturing equipment for upstream and downstream processing. Due to the consistent use of single-use equipment, steam-in-place (SIP) and clean-in-place (CIP) operations are obsolete. All cleanroom suites include connections to the facility wide data logging system (DLS) system, which is preconfigured for plug and play set up of mobile manufacturing equipment.

Chiesi Farmaceutici is named Category Winner for Sustainability for its new research and development centre in Parma, Italy.

The Italian pharmaceutical firm built the centre to host all of its skills and technologies for the identification of lead compounds, preclinical and clinical development, and the management of regulatory activities and its r&d global portfolio.

The centre was designed and constructed to incorporate sustainable systems and processes, paying particular attention to energy saving and reduction of the structure’s environmental impact.

Japan’s Eisai Pharmatechnology & Manufacturing has won the Category for Project Execution for its large production facility in India. The Eisai Knowledge Centre is a 50-acre complex comprising 14 independent buildings constructed on a greenfield site in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India.

In just 17 months, the Eisai team delivered this contemporary, Japanese style, highly automated API research and production and oral solid dosage manufacturing complex. At its peak, the project had 2,000 workers on site with no accidents reported.

Merck & Co is the Category Winner for Facility Integration for its Vaccine Bulk Manufacturing Facility (VBF) projects programme.

Faced with a projected production shortfall for the Varicella product franchise, Merck responded by delivering the VBF projects in Durham, North Carolina, US. The 214,000ft2 facility was built in record time and doubled the output of the vaccine used for chicken pox and shingles.

The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) received Special Recognition for Novel Collaboration for its new greenfield facility located on the perimeter of University College Dublin. The NIBRT building is a medium scale bioprocessing plant providing manufacturing research and training solutions to industry.

The FOYA are sponsored by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), Interphex and Pharmaceutical Processing magazine. They recognise state-of-the-art projects using innovative technologies to reduce pharmaceutical manufacturing costs and to improve the quality of products.

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