Sustainable digitalized pharma production at Pfizer

Gunther Bechmann PhD (right), Senior Manager Operations, Manufacturing, Pfizer, who heads the HighCon plant project, in Pfizer’s new plant in Freiburg, Germany.

The pharmaceutical industry is in a constant race against time. New diseases are always developing that require new medications and vaccinations. And common diseases like cancer are still among the most common causes of death, so the range of treatments is continuously being refined.

One example is high-potency active pharmaceutical ingredients, or HPAPIs for short. In all of these cases, the key is to get medications onto the market as quickly as possible. And that’s not the only challenge: Interrupted supply chains, cost pressures and the demand for efficiency, short innovation cycles, high-quality products and increased flexibility all have to be taken into account.

And, of course, the world’s resources are finite, so there’s an urgent need for sustainability. As a result, the industrial world has never been as complex as it is today.

The solution: Digitalization

The solution to all of these challenges is digitalization and automation. When the real and digital worlds work together, the result is faster and safer production. That’s why we developed an end-to-end digital portfolio of software and automation solutions.

At Pfizer’s new high-containment plant, we act as a single-source provider of complete industrial logistics solutions, from the initial design through to a smoothly running system. The operation at Freiburg is also paperless. Our Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solution has completely digitalized production operations. The Automation Execution System (AES), based on Simatic IT, coordinates the entire flow of materials. It’s the interface between higher-level systems like the order and logistics systems and the lower-level equipment.

High containment for HPAPIs

What distinguishes high-potency active ingredients is their elevated pharmacological action at low doses as well as their high selectivity, which reduces the risk of adverse drug effects. Both of these factors contribute to the growing popularity of HPAPIs in medicine. But their use in medications means that the utmost precautions must be applied during their manufacture. When highly active toxic ingredients are used in manufacturing, it’s essential to ensure maximum cleanliness and safety for people and products in the production process. High-containment plants make that possible.

What’s special about Pfizer’s new plant in Freiburg is that medications in category OEB4 can be made there, but employees only need protective clothing to the OEB3 level — and that improves safety for the employees. This is made possible by a special containment concept and innovative technologies that are monitored and controlled by our building services.

Smart building management

Desigo CC is our integrated, scalable and open building management platform for controlling high-performance buildings and clean-rooms. It can integrate diverse systems and devices and automate all processes. Because Desigo CC is linked to the Simatic WinCC Unified visualization system used at Pfizer, data sharing is easy: Data relevant to production from the building management platform is transferred to the SCADA system via OPC UA.

Simatic WinCC Unified, the innovative, scalable process visualization system, offers many powerful functions for monitoring automated processes. At the same time, information from other production systems can be fed into Desigo CC and used for predictive control functions in the building automation systems. From power distribution to automation, technologies like Desigo PX integrate the various building systems in Pfizer’s new high-containment plant, including ventilation, air-conditioning and heating.