Roche's $330 Million MAB Plant in Basel ISPE's Facility of the Year

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Roche (OTC:RHHBY) (Basel, Switzerland) has emerged as the overall winner of the fifth annual Facility of the Year award. Presented during the morning keynote presentation on November 9, the award was a major highlight of the annual International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE) meeting, which is under way in San Diego. The win follows a rigorous year of evaluation by a panel of judges regarding excellence in pharmaceutical manufacturing technology, design and construction.

As in the past, the award process occurred in two phases. In March, six winners in individual categories were named at the Interphex 2009 annual pharmaceutical conference in New York. Reflecting the global nature of today's pharmaceutical industry, none of the projects nominated for the award were located in the United States.

The original six pharmaceutical companies and their respective award categories include:

Aseptic Technologies (Gembloux, Belgium), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Equipment Innovation

Key Project Team:
Designer/Architect/Engineer: Somville, Presciutti and Partners (Fleurus, Belgium)
Construction Manager: Aseptic Technologies

Centocor Biologics Ireland (Ringaskiddy, County Cork, Ireland), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Sustainability

Key Project Team:
Designer/Architect/Engineer: The PM Group (Blackrock, Ireland) / CRB Consulting Engineers (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania)
Construction Manager: John Sisk and Son (Blackrock)

Centocor R&D Schaffhausen (Schaffhausen, Switzerland), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Facility Integration

Key Project Team:
Designer/Architect/Engineer: Bickel & Bachofen ag (Winterthur, Switzerland) / pmb bau ag (Schaffhausen, Switzerland)
Construction Manager: Danny van Dyck (Beerse, Switzerland)

Hameln Pharma (Hameln, Germany), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Operational Excellence

Key Project Team:
Designer/Architect/Engineer: Koppenhöfer+Partner GmbH (Stuttgart, Germany)
Construction Manager: IKB Immobilien Management (Dusseldorf, Germany)

Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals (Aurangabad, India), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Regional Excellence

Key Project Team:
Designer/Architect/Engineer: R.V. Dalvi & Associates (Mumbai, India) / Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals Projects Department (Aurangabad)
Construction Manager: Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals Projects Department

Roche Pharma Biotech Production Basel (Basel, Switzerland), winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Project Execution

Key Project Team:
Engineer: Roche Pharma Global Engineering and Roche Basel Site Engineering
Designer/Architect: Herzog & deMeuron (Basel)
Main/General Contractor: Linde-KCA (Dresden, Germany)
Construction Manager: Bovis Lend Lease (Munich, Germany)

In addition, GlaxoSmithKline Manufacturing received Honorable Mention for the company's project in Verona, Italy. The winning project is known by Roche as the Monoclonal Antibody (MAB) 95 Facility and was constructed for a total investment of $330 million. The new plant, with 75 cubic meters of fermentation capacity and two downstream processing lines for protein purification/final product manufacture, will initially produce bevacizumab, the active ingredient of the cancer medicine Avastin for the European market. Designed and built as a multipurpose facility, it will eventually manufacture other biopharmaceuticals.

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