A state-of-the-art facility allowing Pfizer to significantly expand its global clinical manufacturing and speed critical therapies to patients has been awarded the 2020 Facility of the Year Award for Facility Integration, by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE). ISPE’s designation honors Pfizer’s Andover Clinical Manufacturing Facility (ACMF), which was engineered and designed by CRB, a global provider of life sciences infrastructure services.
 
Pfizer picked CRB to design the facility and enable the company’s BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences group to move its clinical manufacturing capabilities from Chesterfield, MO, to the new, 175,000-square-foot ACMF in Andover, MA. The space expands support for Pfizer’s rising portfolio of GMP-compliant, clinical bulk drug substances—from 14 campaigns annually at Chesterfield to Andover with the capacity for 21 campaigns and three pivotal trial campaigns per year.
 
CRB designed the ACMF to feature single-use bioreactors and disposable process technologies along with traditional fixed stainless-steel equipment that provide clinical manufacturing options with the lowest cost and greatest flexibility. A set of five cell culture and microbial manufacturing suites are flexibly configured to accommodate Pfizer’s future process developments.
 
“By creating new connections between Pfizer’s clinical manufacturing and commercial manufacturing capabilities, the ACMF marks a physical, operational, and intellectual integration that better informs the biologic process, bolsters quality and improves patient access to potentially life-changing treatments,” said Jeff Matis, senior project manager, CRB. “We are proud to join Pfizer in this important work, and we congratulate them for the foresight and focus on facility integration that earned them this great honor.”
 
Pfizer also won the Facility Integration honor in 2019, for its Biotechnology Center in the Hangzhou Economic Development Area (HEDA) in Hangzhou, China.