Accelerating pharmaceutical development

From the facility's early conceptual visioning sessions, this Fortune 200 pharmaceutical company's goal was to dramatically improve the drug development process. The new, 130,000-square-foot Pharmaceutical Development Center integrates multiple strategies, working in tandem, to fulfill that vision, including rapidly transformable laboratories, flexible and adaptable workspaces, increased opportunities for both planned and unplanned collaboration, visual connectivity to facilitate team productivity, and enhanced support systems throughout the facility.

The Center was designed with an emphasis on workplace innovation, fostering collaboration, transparency, and connectivity. Both the laboratories and workspaces were designed for agile flexibility, allowing team members to adapt their space to the immediate needs of the task at hand.

The laboratory's innovative control and monitoring systems were also designed to offer flexibility in how researchers interact with their experiments, enabling researchers to run experiments remotely from anywhere – within the Center or anywhere off site with web access.

The Center's highly adaptable laboratory infrastructure enables bench reconfigurations to be completed in two to three hours, with additional time allocated for decontamination and recommissioning. These reconfigurations are accomplished without impacting other work being conducted in the immediate vicinity and with no renovations or construction.

The Center brings together organic chemists and engineers to work side-by-side in a collaboration-centric workspace with modeling, analytical, and formulation scientists. With unprecedented visual connectivity, the Center also allows scientists and visitors to see directly into the laboratories, putting "Science on Display."

By rethinking many of the basic assumptions of the development process and implementing leading-edge improvements throughout the facility, the Center reduces delays, eliminates waste, and increases efficiency, enabling researchers to reduce the time it takes to bring successful therapies to market – from years to mere months.

The Innovation Development Center was honored by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) with their 2020 Facility of the Year Award for Operational Excellence. In addition, the Center was also recognized by Lab Manager with their 2020 Lab Design Excellence Award for Innovation.