4 keys to accelerating blockbuster drug production

Your new biopharmaceutical product has the potential to improve outcomes for millions of patients around the world—and it’s poised to pass a critical milestone in U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals. How will you position your facilities to ramp up production quickly? Smart real estate and facility strategies are essential to accelerate the journey from laboratory to production.

The following are four ways to help your facilities keep pace with research and development (R&D) and production demand.

Longstanding biopharmaceutical companies, including contract manufacturers, often rely upon older manufacturing facilities with aging building systems. Yet, aging systems can put production volumes at risk when a piece of equipment malfunctions or fails completely. To maximize uptime,  leading biopharmaceutical manufacturers are adopting next-generation, reliability-focused maintenance methodology that enables building engineers to detect and address emerging malfunctions before a failure brings production to a halt.

Another leading practice is to use a data-driven approach to lifecycle asset management and capital planning. Using mobile technology, your real estate and facilities team can create an asset registry that includes age, warranty coverage, expected lifespan and other details, and rank potential capital investments in terms of cost, urgency and importance.

Backed by data, your team can use the objective capital plan to secure C-suite support for investments that will benefit the larger business. Combined with reliability-focused maintenance, a data-driven capital plan can help you reduce capital expenditures and, most important, improve uptime and production volume.

If accelerated speed to market is the goal, working with a life sciences real estate service provider can shave weeks off a construction schedule—while keeping the project within budget. For instance, when a mid-tier biotechnology company faced an urgent opportunity to help address a public health crisis, it partnered with a life sciences project manager to bring a new 210,000-square-foot laboratory and GXP production facility online in an accelerated timeline.

The company enlisted a project manager early on to serve as owner’s representative and provide guidance on selection and installation of such critical systems as vibration sensors, infrared scans for electrical equipment, water injection, HEPA filtration and more, as well as overall construction management.

The project management team included FM experts to help establish standard operating procedures and set up a computerized maintenance management system and other foundational elements of FM operations. The FM team helped ensure the proper installation, calibration and certification of critical systems, and established streamlined, cost-efficient and value-added FM practices across the enterprise.