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News Release from: SPECIAL REPORT by the Editor | Subject: Wyeth editorial
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 20 September 2005
Wyeth Grange Castle biopharma plant
opens
Last week saw the official opening ceremony for the Wyeth Grange Castle biopharmaceuticals production plant near Dublin, writes Nick Denbow
Last week saw the official opening ceremony for the Wyeth Grange Castle plant near Dublin (See the Wyeth press release describing this on www.processingtalk.com/news/whp/whp122.html) This is a major achievement, as the world's largest bio-pharmaceutical production plant, and an investment of $2Billion, to ensure that certain cells will consistently feed on the right nutrients and produce the right result
Production output may only be measured in a few 2kg sugar bags, per year, according to Business Plus magazine in Ireland: See www.processingtalk.com/news/whp/whp121.html.
The potential benefit from even such small quantities of these bio-pharmaceuticals will be felt by thousands of people around the world, when their drugs alleviate arthritis and other significant diseases.
As always the information from pharma projects is hard to find, but Business Plus had some really excellent photos, showing views of the plant.
There we can see Millipore custom engineered systems: their filtration and chromatography products are used in various stages in the purification processes at the facility (See Millipore stories on www.processingtalk.com/news/mll/mll000.html).
Pro-Tech workstations (www.processingtalk.com/news/prv/prv100.html) provide clean area access for the process operators into the Emerson DeltaV batch control systems that provide all plant automation, control and the essential production records (See for example a similar biotech project, for the Genzyme Corporation, reported by Emerson on www.processingtalk.com/news/eme/eme191.html).
In October 2003 there was a presentation from the Grange Castle engineering team at the Manufacturing Excellence Ireland conference (See www.processingtalk.com/news/mnu/mnu000.html), where their Automation Programme Director George Skillin presented some of the major challenges that had to be faced in the 15,000 I/O project.
A major concern in meeting the accelerated project timescale imposed for the engineering design was the worldwide DeltaV programming resource available.
Despite locating the plant in Ireland, with its large installed base of DeltaV in pharmaceuticals, George explained that this global project required significant automation engineering resource from teams based in Austin, St Louis and Andover in the US; Pune India; Rijswijk Holland; Copenhagen Denmark; Dublin/Cork Ireland and Leicester/Fareham UK, using over 500,000 man-hours of Emerson Process Management engineering and software design plus further resources from subcontractors and suppliers.
The scale of the Wyeth plant will continue this resource problem, already the management are concerned that their graduate intake of maybe 100 per annum will not be available, given the current output from Ireland's Universities.
The investment in the plant just confirms the position Ireland has already claimed as the location for future pharma and bio-pharma research and expertise: See www.processingtalk.com/news/eme/eme157.html.
The majority of the 2000 staff already employed on the plant are graduate level engineers and scientists.
Hopefully, with the obvious need to attract further skilled engineers and resources for the future benefit of this plant, Processingtalk will soon be able to present more reports about the processing technology and automation involved in this major venture.
The above text was presented as a newsletter commentary dated 20 September from Nick Denbow, Processingtalk Editor.
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