ISPE Names Eli Lilly Kinsale Limited the 2024 Facility of the Year Awards Overall Winner
18 October, 2024
Prestigious award honors top pharmaceutical facility projects each year; showcases impressive engineering feats and technological innovation
ISPE has recognized Eli Lilly Kinsale Limited as the Overall Winner of the 2024 Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) for its IE2b facility based in Kinsale, Ireland. The winner was announced and formally recognized during ISPE's FOYA Banquet and Awards Celebration held in conjunction with the 2024 ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo in Orlando, Florida. The vision for Eli Lilly’s IE2b project was to marry innovative, advanced technologies into a first-of-its-kind hybrid manufacturing platform in order to optimize synthetic peptide production for use in life-saving medications.
Eli Lilly's IE2b was recognized as a winner in the 2024 FOYA Innovation Category for its hybrid manufacturing platform. The novel platform uses solid phase synthesis of small, high-purity peptide fragments with efficient liquid phase peptide bond-forming chemistry and leverages continuous processing technology and principles. Process analytical technology, a cutting-edge nanofiltration system, and a digital material tracking model all helped the facility significantly boost annual throughput while minimizing risk, and inefficiency– all to produce high-volume, complex peptides at a commercial manufacturing scale.
The Lilly IE2b facility underscores the importance of perseverance of innovation through adversity. The build started just as COVID-19 pandemic-related shutdowns began in Ireland, forcing the team to adjust their timelines and proceed with caution while developing the novel synthetic peptide manufacturing platform and constructing the new facility on an operational manufacturing campus. In close communication, Lilly's headquarters staff trialed the platform's miniaturized prototypes to inform design and construction, which IE2b staff later manufactured into the full-size versions on-site – all while the facility structure was being built. Despite the challenges of maintaining a global team project during the COVID-19 pandemic, the team maintained continuous collaboration, effective planning, and rigorous safety protocols. This resulted in the facility's completion on schedule, with no workplace-related COVID cases or significant safety disruptions after over 1.6 million construction hours.
Designing this platform and constructing the resulting manufacturing facility presented more barriers than could be imagined, but we brought a group of fantastic people together who were ready to transform the status quo regarding traditional peptide-based medicine manufacturing concepts. We are thrilled to be recognized as the 2024 FOYA Overall Winner and it shines a light on our team's dedication to creating a novel industry-leading manufacturing facility that will ultimately bring a more reliable supply of medicine to our patients worldwide.
The Lilly IE2b facility exemplifies the impact of embracing innovation and rethinking traditional methods. To date, the team at IE2B has estimated a higher annual throughput and level of quality and a lower amount of waste and environmental impact – proving the value of high-frequency monitoring, high-quality data, and the ability to control and release batches at a phenomenal rate. The team at IE2b received this award for not only pushing the boundaries of peptide manufacturing but also serving as a catalyst for a future of integrating trusted and advanced technologies in facilities driven by a commitment to innovation, collaboration, and excellence.
About the ISPE Facility of the Year Awards Program
Established in 2005, the Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) recognize 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. The FOYA program provides a platform for the pharmaceutical science and manufacturing industry to showcase its accomplishments in facility design, construction, and operation, while sharing the development of new applications of technology and cutting-edge approaches. Visit ISPE.org/FOYA for more information.