Six companies took top honors at this year’s INTERPHEX Exhibitor Awards on opening day of the 2018 International Pharmaceutical Expo in April.
INTERPHEX, held annually in New York City, is the premier pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device development and manufacturing event.
The awards program, which is sponsored by Pharmaceutical Processing, was established to recognize companies that showcase creative technologies and/or new strategies and services that have significantly improved pharma and biopharma development and manufacturing.
Companies competed in six categories: Best in Show; Best New Product/Service; Editor’s Choice; Best Technological Innovation; INTERPHEX Efficiency Champion, and Biotech Innovation.
The 2018 winners by category were:
Best in Show: Vanrx Pharmasystemsfor itsMicrocell Vial Filler, a system that enables certain drug development functions to take place earlier in a drug product’s lifecycle. It saves time in pre-clinical/clinical development and helps speed product to market. In the personalized medicines space, the Microcell allows safe and rapid scale-out of clinical and commercial manufacturing. As a standard design, it can be built quickly, allowing companies to add more validated capacity in months, rather than years. Robotic automation and single-use product contact materials eliminate the risks of human error in manual filling and cross-contamination, respectively.
The Best in Show award recognizes accomplishments and display in the use of knowledge, innovation, and state-of-the-art technologies to achieve extraordinary levels of quality, production goals, and objectives—ultimately transforming critical and affordable life-enhancing ideas to finished drug products.
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Best New Product/Service: Nymi Inc. for the Nymi Band, a device designed tobenefit manufacturers, workers, and regulatory bodies. It gives manufacturers the ability to trust data produced in thousands of logs every day, allowing them to avoid audits and steer clear of regulatory concerns along the manufacturing chain. The Nymi Band is fast at logging actions into the system, providing efficiency, high security, and adherence to regulatory requirements. It also provides less friction in authentication methods and greater control for IT teams by offering both physical and logical access.
The Best New Product/Service award is given to the exhibitor that encourages, develops, and features the very best in new products or services showcasing knowledge, innovation, and state-of-the-art technologies leading to significant business, economic, or manufacturing benefits for the pharma and bio industries.
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Editor’s Choice (sponsored by Pharmaceutical Processing): LifeAire Systemsfor its patented technologythat removes up to 99.99 percent of biological and chemical contaminants, resulting in a superior air-purity level that LifeAire guarantees. It can improve outcomes, including a significant increase in productivity and reduction in batch loss, while enhancing product integrity and improving ROI, especially important for biological and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Air change rates can be significantly reduced (15-20 exchanges in the system versus 60-90 exchanges in a HEPA-only system) resulting in a significant reduction in energy and HVAC operating costs. In addition, the system eliminates cross-contamination, a concern in cell/gene therapy R&D and manufacturing.
This Editor’s Choice award recognizes and honors the exhibiting company that, in the view of the Pharmaceutical Processing editor, best demonstrates knowledge, innovation, and technologies within the pharma and biopharma industries.
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Best Technological Innovation: Millipore Sigmafor theMillistak+ HC Prosynthetic depth filters that can decrease cycle time to produce and release product. The depth filters reduce TOC extractables and provide a 50 percent reduction in the recommended pre-use flush volume.Recent advancements in the productivity of upstream cell culture processes require higher filtration capacities, exceeding the capabilities of the naturally derived filters currently available. As fully synthetic depth filters for primary and secondary clarification, the Millistak+ HC Pro portfolio provides as much as twice the filtration capacity in primary clarification applications versus commercial DE-based bench marks, and offers biopharmaceutical manufacturers an improved consistency that will help them design a more robust and controlled clarification process.
The Best Technological Innovationaward recognizes cutting-edge technologies, either new technologies or a novel implementation of existing technologies, that have the potential to change the way pharma/bio companies operate.
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INTERPHEX Efficiency Champion: Steris Life Sciencesfor the STERIS VHP DC-A, anew generation of vaporized hydrogen peroxide decontamination chambers for the transfer of materials, components, and material bags into aseptic manufacturing cleanroom areas. The new product decontaminates surfaces of transfer material loads under room temperature and atmospheric conditions, and minimizes particulate burden that would otherwise transfer to the cleanroom side along with the unloading. Key elements are increased safety of materials being transferred, as the VHP concentrations per cycle are minimized by true continuous process control. As a stand-alone unit that does not need HVAC connections, it contributes to savings in the validation process and adds to processing-environment and operator safety. Bioburden and particulate control, along with enhanced operator safety, minimize peroxide consumption and sterilant exposure.
The INTERPHEX Efficiency Championaward is given to an exhibitor whose product or service understands the need for integrated efficiencies in processes and supports the fast pacing of the pharma/bio industry—whether in research, development, or commercial-scale production.
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Biotech Innovation: GroningerUSA LLCfor itsFlexPro 50, which can be built with fully automated process steps according to requirements. It gives maximum process safety in aseptic fill/finish, reducing the risk at human intervention. Ready-to-use vials, cartridges, and syringes can be processed on one-line by changing format parts (no trolley exchange); additional flexibility is given by exchanging the machine trolleys to process vials in trays or in bulk in the same line configuration. The isolator works independently of the facility´s HVAC system—the entire technical equipment is built in the isolator with an overall height of less than 3 meters. Hand gloves on front and back of the main and add-on isolators allow machine access from both sides. Setting up filling paths, handling of environmental monitoring, and introducing components can be done without using tools. A new direct-injection-system reduces the decontamination cycle by 50 percent. The line can be changed to process different products in two hours.
The Biotech Innovationaward acknowledges an exhibitor’s innovative application to a given product or service that not only addresses an industry need but does so in such a way as to exceed previous standards or applications—thereby making the given process simpler, smoother, or easier to navigate.
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The INTERPHEX Exhibit Award Judges
The judges on this year’s Exhibitor Awards panel were Joyceann Garippa, Editorial Director, Design & Manufacturing Group, Advantage Business Marketing; David Hall, Vice President of Sales, Parenteral Drug Association (PDA), Christa Myers, Associate/Lead Process Engineering, CRB; and Barry Holtz,Principal, Holtz Biopharma Consulting.
INTERPHEX represents the future of pharmaceutical, biotech, and device development and manufacturing innovation, offering access to new business trends and strategies, cutting-edge technical sessions and state-of-the-art technologies, products, and services to reduce costs, increase productivity, and maximize efficiency.
INTERPHEX 2019 will take place April 2-4, 2019 at the Javits Center in New York City. Information on next year’s award categories and full entry details will be available to exhibitors early next year.