ISPE announces 2017 Facility of the Year Awards

Eli Lilly and Company was announced the overall winner

The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) has announced 2017 Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) programme at ISPE’s Annual Meeting & Expo in San Diego, California. Eli Lilly and Company was announced the overall winner.

Eli Lilly was awarded for their Continuous Direct Compression Manufacturing Kits 2 & 3 project in Indianapolis, Indiana and Carolina, Puerto Rico. Their primary goal was to quickly build a network of innovative, state-of-the-art GMP oral solid dosage (OSD) facilities to deliver new advanced therapies to patients. Each of the three OSD installations were built sequentially in existing operating facilities at three separate geographic sites.

Process and facility replication was identified early in the project as a key enabler to improve technical transfers from development to manufacturing, as well as compress the schedule, and create budget efficiencies to achieve swift commercialisation. As a result, the delivery schedule for each subsequent project continued to improve from the baseline case and millions of dollars were saved from replication and learning.

Their forward-thinking approach brought on the implementation of Continuous Direct Compression (CDC) Process and other process innovations in their OSD facilities across their manufacturing network—making them the only company with multiple, replicated, and operational CDC sites.

This combination of technology and process understanding along with identical standardised production platforms is what makes this project the winner of the 2017 Facility of the Year Awards Overall Winner.

The other winners are Abbott for operational excellence, Bristol-Myers Squibb for facility integration, Cook Pharmica for equipment innovation and Jazz Pharmaceuticals Ireland for project execution.