AES Clean Technology, a provider of high-performance cleanroom facilities within the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, is celebrating being the cleanroom partner to all of the North American award-winning and honorable mention facilities at this year’s ISPE Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA).

ISPE’s FOYA Awards provides recognition for state-of-the-art projects which use new, innovative technologies to improve the quality of products and reduce the cost of producing high-quality medicines.

Having produced cleanrooms for three of this year’s winners, Grant Merrill, CEO of AES Clean Technology, said, “We are delighted to see our partners recognized at this year’s ISPE Awards. To be able to acknowledge and celebrate the growth and success of our business and theirs is fantastic.

“It’s a huge morale booster for our team that illustrates their hard work and commitment to delivering these critical cleanroom facilities. I’m sure this will now spur us on to even greater things going forward.”

Among the winners this year were CRISPR Therapeutics, a company harnessing the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing platform to develop and deliver potentially curative therapies to patients with serious diseases. The technology has game-changing implications for patients and partners.

Judges were impressed with CRISPR Therapeutics “flexible, digitally-enabled facility.” It received a FOYA award for Innovation based on the innovative design of the facility, which provides an end-to-end solution for production and fill operations.

The Catalent Pharma Solutions facility was crowned Social Impact category winner. AES designed and built Catalent’s 27,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility and an additional 30,000 sq. ft. fill/finish area, after years of successful projects at the site.

The project included the AES modular cleanroom system, multi-level clean space, custom weigh/dispense booth and integrated mechanical systems and HEPA filtration. It also used process utility panels and electrical distribution panels, as well as custom window pass-thru units and tubing pass-thru units. In addition, AES Clean Technology carried out all the engineering and site project management.

Iovance Biotherapeutics earned the Honorable Mention award for its facility that is dedicated to developing, manufacturing and commercializing novel cancer immunotherapies based on Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes. 

Unlike a typical manufacturing facility that is designed to produce millions of identical products, at the Iovance facility, each product is made from the starting material of an individual patient and is unique.  AES has a long-standing resume of completed cleanroom projects that support autologous cell therapy manufacturing and was a critical partner to the project team that brought this facility to life.

Each of these facilities featured AES’ modular cleanroom technology, which helped move the projects forward at high speed while delivering predictable results and leading to reduced construction materials and waste.