Press Room

Press Clipping / Jan 25, 2019

Fire Services Bureau holds emergency drill at Hovione plant in Taipa

Macau News Agency, January 25, 2019

The Fire Services Bureau held an emergency drill at the Hovione pharmaceutical plant in Taipa, to better strengthen the resilience and coordination of the bureau, and about 150 personnel from both parties participated.

Macau Factory | Hovione

Macau (MNA) – The Fire Services Bureau (CB) on Thursday held an emergency drill at the Hovione PharmaScience Ltd Plant (Hovione) in Taipa, to better strengthen the resilience and coordination of the bureau.

According to a release by the CB, the drill simulated an accident occurring when a worker operating a forklift at the pharmaceutical plant pierced a methanol solvent storage tank and caused a fire.

During the evacuation process of the drill, workers pretended to be injured while the remainder of the staff took safety measures in accordance with the internal contingency plan of the plant, and evacuated all relevant personnel to their emergency meeting point.

When informed of the ‘accident’, the CB dispatched nine emergency vehicles and 37 firefighters to the scene who carried out fire fighting, evacuations, search and rescue, as well as caring for the injured, according to an established plan.

The exercise lasted for about an hour, and a total of 150 personnel from both Hovione and the CB participated in the exercise.

The release states that the drill went smoothly and achieved its intended purpose, and after its completion, a meeting took place between both parties to discuss future exercises in testing their responses.

 

Read complete article at MNA

 

 

Also in the Press Room

See All

Continuous Tableting (CT) is defined as continuous manufacturing of oral dose drugs, specifically tablets. As per ICH's Q13 definition1, a continuous manufacturing process in the pharmaceutical industry comprises at least two unit operations integrated from a mechanical and software perspective. There is a wide combination of possible CT process configurations that are dependent on the needs of the intended product formulation and each of the individual unit operations that constitute the process train can be continuous, semi-continuous, or batch processes. The typical manufacturing processes for tablet formulation are direct compression (DC), dry granulation (DG) and wet granulation (WG)2 - details on these manufacturing processes are beyond the scope of this article, so the interested reader is directed to relevant literature. The actual implementation of CT technology in a facility can broadly vary depending on the level of desired integration and automation. Process trains can be designed to be flexible and converted between multiple configurations (e.g. continuous DC, DG and WG), controlled by the end user from one single software and within a single clean room. The other possibility would be for subsections of the CT process to be divided into multiple clean rooms where inprocess materials are transferred between suites via a bin-to-bin approach (e.g. a granulation suite to prepare granules from raw materials followed by continuous DC (CDC) to blend the granules and produce tablets). The level of automation and instrumentation designed into the CT process (typically involving Process Analytical Technologies, PAT) can open the possibility to implement sophisticated control strategies. Key components of a control strategy that need to be considered for CT are material tracking and genealogy, knowledge of the residence time distribution (RTD), and in-process controls (spectroscopic and/or soft sensors based on process parameters). Holistically, these control strategy elements enable the implementation of a material diversion strategy to automatically divert out of specification material from the process. In their most advanced form, control strategies may also enable real time release testing (RTRt) of the final tablet drug product and reduce the off-line analytical burden and the number of operators needed to manage the process.   Read the full article at gmp-journal.com  

Article

Continuous Tableting and the Road to Global Adoption

Mar 04, 2024