FOYA projects enhanced with GEA Technology

Published: 20-Oct-2014

The company supplies equipment to three winners at the ISPE awards

This year, GEA was involved in three projects that won International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) FOYA awards in different categories.

The Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) recognise innovation and creativity in manufacturing facilities serving the regulated healthcare industries.

Grifols' North Fractionation facility in Clayton, North Carolina, US took the award for Project Execution.

This facility operates with a closed and fully automated manufacturing process in an ambient environment to deliver life-saving plasma medicines in the safest, quality conscious and efficient manner. For this plant, GEA supplied 14 hycon type separators for the continuous clarification of suspensions for the recovery of human blood plasma fractions.

The BSH30 clarifier achieves highest solid concentrations with an aseptic processing concept, said GEA.

'Grifols has very high standards, and we can always rely upon the same high standards from GEA in delivering our separation technology needs,' said Detlef Kehm, Grifols’ Vice President of Engineering.

'I am personally very pleased with ISPE’s independent validation of this superior project and with GEA’s performance.'

GEA was also involved in Project PennDragon, Penn Pharmaceutical Services' contained manufacturing facility project, which took the Facility Integration award.

After conducting extensive market research, Penn Pharma identified an increased need in the solid dose oncology market for the outsourced development and production of highly toxic drugs. The company elected to work with GEA because of its track record in high containment technology and expertise in creating fully integrated production lines.

GEA’s approach was to eliminate the use of isolators in favour of containment interfaces (Buck MC high-containment valves and the Hicoflex disposable containment system). The new plant includes two fully contained lines – from powder dispensing to tablet compression: one for R&D and the other for small-scale production.

The project has significantly increased Penn's capacity and the company can now manufacture approximately 500 additional batches during a standard two-shift operation.

In the third award-winning project, the pharmaceutical manufacturer did not wish to divulge details of the installation, nor of the equipment supplied by GEA.