VACCINE PRODUCTION FACILITY

BUILT IN RECORD TIME

PHARMACEUTICAL ENGINEERING: With a design and construction time at just 11 months NNE has built a vaccine production facility for Bavarian Nordic A/S in Denmark.

Usually it takes two to three years to build a vaccine facility, but the engineering company NNE has since 2001 had as their main goal to be the first in the world to manage a construction time at just a year from the start of detail design to the end of operational qualification.

“We work with dividing the facility into different modules at an early stage”, Klaus Illum from NNE explains. “Being able to hand over different types of modules to competent entrepreneurs we are able to simplify the construction period drastically”.

Saving money
The goal is that the pharmaceutical company will be able to start their production as fast as possible after having gained a patent. NNE tries to divide the company into modules that are easy to connect, where one part is easy to reuse from project to project and can be done in the same way in different projects. A few include the whole process and will then have to be adapted to the smallest detail. By rationalising the construction process the pharmaceutical company can save a lot of money.

“If we have two modules that are almost identical, why not standardise them and make them completely alike?”, Klaus Illum asks. “We achieve great savings with this copying method”.

Aseptic production

NNE has 1000 employees, with offices in China, France, Sweden, USA and in Søborg in the home country Denmark. After just 15 years on the market NNE has achieved a turnover of more than EUR 135 million.

The Bavarian project in Kvistgaard, Denmark started in august 2004. Already in May 2005, Bavarian took over the facility that contains GMP standard and the big sterilized rooms in class B and C that consists of 1,100 m2. The facility also contains 400 m2 laboratories and NNE has helped Bavarian with environmental describing EIA reports. The vaccine production facility contains a high biosafety level which means that the building’s surroundings will have to be protected against the vaccine products. 

Bavarian’s facility will produce third generation smallpox vaccine. It is a completely sterile product with the highest degree of cleanness. Former smallpox vaccines have had side effects and other vaccines do not have the desired effect on a fourth of the patients, mostly children and elderly.

New record
That the Bavarian project is not an exception can be seen by NNE’s track record. Infive consecutive projects NNE has gradually reduced the execution time from initial 24 months for a 32,000 m2 bulk pharmaceutical facility to the current record of 11 months for the Bavarian Nordic project. A remarkable achievement that in 2005 was appreciated by the ISPE with the Facility of the Year Award for a cell culture plant executed in only 18 months. The award was received in competition with 28 other projects from 12 different countries.

http://www.nne.com