Interphex 2007 Conference and Exhibition Kicks Off with Record Attendance

Interphex 2007 Conference and Exhibition, New York, NY (Apr. 24)- Interphex 2007 Conference and Exhibition opened today with nearly 1000 exhibiting companies and record attendance anticipated for the show. This year’s meeting also featured the launch of PharmaMedDevice, a conference and trade show, co-located with Interphex and designed to converge the medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries.

Manufacturing facilities recognized
The first day of Interphex also featured recognition of five pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities located in China, Germany, Japan, and the United States with facility-of-the-year honors.

Cook Pharmica LLC (Bloomington, Indiana, www.cookpharmica.com), the contract biopharmaceutical manufacturing division of Cook Medical was selected for facility integration. Cook Pharmica is a biopharmaceutical contract manufacturer of mammalian cell culture-based products. Cook was honored for its Project Phoenix facility in Bloomington, Indiana. Project Phoenix (Phase I) included the renovation and construction within the first of two buildings. It included the renovation and construction of 124,000 square feet, which included office areas, a manufacturing train, a shell for a second manufacturing train, development laboratories, quality-control laboratories, warehousing, and process utilities. The project is designed to support two manufacturing trains.

Genentech, Inc.’s (South San Francisco, CA, www.gene.com) facility in Oceanside, California was recognized for project execution. Upon completion of licensure from US Food and Drug Administration (Rockville, MD, www.fda.gov) in 2007, the facility will add 90,000 L of capacity for production of “Avastin” (bevacizumab).

Roche’s (Basel Switzerland www.roche.com) Shanghai Roche Pharmaceuticals Ltd, a joint venture between Sunve Pharmaceuticals of China was recognized for regional excellence in project execution. The Shanghai Potent Production Project involved construction of a new building for producing highly active drug requiring high containment. The facility was created to manufacture tablets and capsules for the Chinese market and export certain products.

Taiyo Yakuhin Co. Ltd, located in Takayama City, Japan was recognized for equipment innovation. It began the in-house project of manufacturing prefilled syringes, and the project now produces a total of six products including four plastic syringe containers and two glass syringe containers.

And Vetter Pharma-Fertigung GmbH & Co. KG (Ravensburg, Germany, www.vetter-pharma.com) was recognized for process innovation.