BMS, Wyeth and FDA Win 2005 Team of the Year Competition

PharmaManufacturing.com
05/05/2005

Results were extremely close in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing’s inaugural Team of the Year competition. First-place winners are Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Indiana Technical Operations team, in the large-scale projects category, for its efforts at the company’s Evansville and Mt. Vernon facilities, and Wyeth Pharmaceutical’s EH&S team in St.-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec, the small-scale project winner, for making dramatic improvements to plant safety and culture.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Process Analytical Technology (PAT) team won a separate award for catalyzing important changes in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Awards will be presented to winners and finalists at their facilities this month and in June. All finalists were featured in our April issue.

Second-place, or Silver Award, winners are Novartis’ Tech Ops Team in Suffern, N.Y., in the large-scale projects category, and Nutri Granulations’ team in La Mirada, Calif., in the small-scale projects category.

Coming in third, receiving Bronze Awards, are Baxter Healthcare’s North Cove Facility’s 1-L IV Solutions Team and Pfizer’s Tri Blender and Process Improvement teams in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Alza Corp.’s IONSYS manufacturing team in Vacaville, Calif. has won honorable mention for its work in preparing a combination drug-device for commercialization.

A panel of independent judges evaluated each team’s efforts. Team and company names, locations and all other identifiers were removed from materials sent to the judges, and each team’s projects were rated 0 to 5 based on the degree of difficulty involved, reach, legacy, metrics and results.

“These were excellent projects,” said judge Noemi Santiago, Ph.D., a member of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing’s editorial board and director of technical operations for solids at Johnson & Johnson’s Pharmaceutical Sourcing Group Americas. “All were very good projects, and great to see,” agreed judge Scott Tarpley, consultant with Light Pharma, Inc.

Also judging the competition were:

• Cynthia Palka, CEO, Future Map, Inc.
  
  
• Jim Agalloco, President, Agalloco & Associates
  
  
• John Blanchard, Principal Analyst, Life Sciences, ARC Advisory Group
  
  
• Lisa Pantano, Senior Pharmaceutical Engineer at Roche
  
  
• Penelope Przekop, Director, Global Quality Management, J&J Pharmaceuticals Group’s Benefit-Risk Management Organization.

We plan to expand the awards next year, and invite you to consider nominating your teams in 2006!