Cook Pharmica biologic facility wins award
for its biopharmaceutical facility.
The Indiana-based firm has been bestowed with the 2007 Facility of the Year Award for Facility/Integration after it transformed a vacant television assembly plant in Bloomington, into a $70m (€52.6m) biopharmaceutical contract manufacturing facility. Cook said that for the purpose, it renovated an existing building originally built in the 1960s in a project that combined conventional construction for the administrative and laboratory areas with state-of-the-art modular construction for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing areas. Work, including the completion of critical systems validations, was completed in 32 months, "a remarkably short period," said Cook Pharmica, which was set up as a spin-off from Cook Medical that was formed in shortly before the facility construction began in response to the biopharma industry's need for additional mammalian cell culture manufacturing capacity and development services. As part of the new facility, Cook installed technology that allowed it to offer live webcam services - making it the first contract manufacturer to offer such a capability. The Webcam services are provided via a secure Internet connection to customers, to allow them to view production as it occurs and help ensure manufacturing quality control. The company will also provide Webcam services to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its international equivalents, pending client approval. By winning the Facility/Integration category award, which was sponsored by the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE), Interphex and Pharmaceutical Processing magazine, Cook Pharmica is now one of five finalists for the overall Facility of the Year Award, which will be announced during the ISPE's international annual meeting in Milan in November. Other facility award winners, who are now also in the running, were US firm Genentech, winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Project Execution; Shanghai Roche Pharmaceuticals, located in Shanghai, China, selected as winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Project Execution Regional Excellence; Japan's Taiyo Pharmaceutical Industry Co., who won the Facility of the Year Award for Equipment Innovation; and German company Vetter Pharma-Fertigung, winner of the Facility of the Year Award for Process Innovation.
