Eli Lilly’s Award Winning Project is Extended with an Additional Module

November 6, 2019

Eli Lilly and Company, a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world, has taken delivery of a new skid in collaboration with Zeton. This skid will complement the existing modular production facility (SVC) for which Eli Lilly and Company won the prestigious 2019 ISPE Facility of the Year Awards in the category of Process Innovation.

The existing modular production facility is referred to as Small Volume Continuous (SVC) because it is targeted at pipeline products with an annual volume less than 1.5 metric tonnes. The continuous unit operations are provided on mobile skids that can be interconnected and configured in multiple ways. The skid modules and feed vessels are interconnected with flexible tubing which can be dedicated to a single product or disposed of after use. Continuous process skids include plug flow reactors, continuous stirred reactors, distillation, extraction, filtration, and crystallization.

The new process skid focuses on filtration. This dual filtration skid operates with a duty filter and an off-line filter for actively removing product and liquefying the cake. The operation and sequences of the filter and the checks for possible malfunctions are regulated by the operating system which is designed for “plug and play” so that it can be configured in multiple sequences and is recognized immediately by the distributed control system (DCS).

Zeton contributed to this project through our expertise in pharmaceutical processes and modular, scale specific know-how in design and construction. The SVC facility provides a window to the future of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) production in the pharmaceutical industry.