MedImmune Manufacturing Facility Recognized as 2011 Facility of the Year in Pharmaceutical Engineering

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Nov. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MedImmune, the global biologics arm of AstraZeneca, today announced that the company's expansion project at its Frederick, Md., Manufacturing Center (FMC) won the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering's overall 2011 Facility of the Year Award.  This is the first time MedImmune has won this prestigious internationally renowned accolade.    

The annual Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA), sponsored by the ISPE, INTERPHEX and Pharmaceutical Processing magazine, recognizes state-of-the-art projects utilizing new, innovative technologies to improve the quality of products, reduce the cost of producing high-quality medicines, and demonstrate advances in project delivery.

"MedImmune is honored to receive the overall 2011 FOYA for expanding our Frederick Manufacturing Center, which is a testament to the dedication and diligence of our team," said Doug Scott, Vice President of Engineering at MedImmune. "We achieved our goals by implementing ordinary tools in extraordinary ways, including our innovative approach to startup and operator training, our unique process for offline validation, and our robust project management processes."

The new facility will initially house 337,000 square feet of administrative, production, warehouse, laboratory, and utility space. To accommodate future growth, MedImmune designed internal expansion capabilities of an additional 100,000 square feet of production space, creating a flexible, large-scale mammalian cell culture-based production facility. The FMC Expansion Project was selected as the overall FOYA winner from a group of seven state-of-the-art projects in four countries. The FMC expansion project was previously honored at INTERPHEX 2011 as a FOYA category winner for project execution.  

The FOYA judging panel, consisting of global senior-level biopharmaceutical executives from all areas of the industry, recognized the FMC Expansion Project for:

• Excellent safety record and aggressive timeline;
• Continued efforts to assist the workforce through the expansion project;
• Flexibility at a large scale requiring MedImmune to overlap and accelerate project phases increasing project risk; and
• The use of military training methodology that resulted in the successful shakedown runs performed simultaneously with ongoing construction efforts.  

For the past 12 years, MedImmune's FMC has manufactured a monoclonal antibody to help prevent an infectious disease.

About MedImmune

MedImmune, the global biologics arm for AstraZeneca PLC, has approximately 3,500 employees worldwide and is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland. For more information, visit MedImmune's website at www.medimmune.com.

About AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business with a primary focus on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, neuroscience, respiratory and inflammation, oncology and infectious disease. AstraZeneca operates in over 100 countries and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. For more information please visit: www.astrazeneca.com.

SOURCE MedImmune