Injectable-Filling Facility Grows During Pandemic
Date Posted: July 26, 2022
Posted In: COVID-19 Updates, Projects,
From ENR: Vaccines to prevent or ease the symptoms of COVID-19 were eagerly awaited in 2020 during the heart of the public health crisis. A contract development and manufacturing organization in Grand Rapids, Mich., was called upon to make the vaccines right at the same time that the firm’s new injectable filling facility was opening.
Increased demand from other customers only added to the need for more space at Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing (GRAM), which fills biologics, small molecules and vaccines used to prevent and treat a wide range of illnesses.
The company, which provides sterile parenteral development, manufacturing, testing and regulatory filling support for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, opened a $110-million injectable facility in June 2020 and now is in the second phase of building out the 90,000-sq-ft structure.
GRAM fills injectables with compounded medications containing a sterile drug that has therapeutic actions and is administered in the body through needles and syringes. Parenteral refers to medicinal solutions administered somewhere in the body other than the mouth or alimentary canal, including injections or infusions that are intravenous, subcutaneous or intramuscular.
GRAM was founded in 2010 with a handful of employees and has grown to more than 400 workers in multiple Grand Rapids facilities. The company’s expansion at 524 Butterworth St. SW was divided into three phases. GRAM hired CRB of St. Louis, which handles construction projects for vaccine and critical therapy manufacturers, for design-build and construction management.
The first phase started in 2018 to develop the site and build the aseptic pharmaceutical manufacturing structure, which brought some unexpected challenges.
“Soil studies showed that the site had voids underground due to gypsum mines from years ago,” says John Wichelt, GRAM vice president of client pharmaceutical services. “There were voids identified as deep as 100 feet. We pumped concrete to fill the voids and then installed concrete piers to stabilize the building.”
The project also entailed adding about $5 million of clean room space, which was done safely by completely separating the clean room that was performing current filling activities from the expansion space.
“Maintaining the isolation of the plenum space air was one of the challenges,” Wichelt says. “CRB separated construction air from the clean room space by installing a plenum divider.”