French drugmaker Sanofi took home the top prize last night at the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering’s 2026 Facility of the Year Award (FOYA) banquet, recognizing biopharmaceutical manufacturing projects for their advances in operations, innovation, supply chain, digitalization, and social impact.

Sanofi’s twin facilities in Neuville-sur-Saône, France and Tuas, Singapore were selected as a category winner for Innovation – Facility of the Future and also awarded this year’s overall FOYA award for exemplifying how the application of advanced digital technologies leads to improved outcomes in terms of safety, product quality, and productivity.

Mike Martin, ISPE’s president and CEO, said at the dinner ceremony that the overall FOYA award to Sanofi recognizes a global manufacturing project that brings together innovation, flexibility, sustainability, and operational excellence.

Sanofi’s twin facilities in France and Singapore “stood out for reimagining what modern biomanufacturing can be,” according to Martin, who noted the company’s dual-site approach was “designed as a fully modular, digitally native platform” enabling multiple vaccines and biologics to be produced within a single facility while “dramatically” reducing changeover time.

ISPE called out the Sanofi Modulus platform for its “plug-and-produce” modular architecture, allowing manufacturing lines to be rapidly reconfigured for different products or processes — with new equipment modules simply moved in and connected to pre-installed utility, data, and control interfaces.

“Advanced automation, artificial intelligence, real-time analytics, and predictive technologies are integrated throughout the operation, creating a manufacturing model built for speed, resilience, and future demand,” Martin added. “This project represents a new standard for flexible and intelligent biomanufacturing.”

FOYA judge Gunter Baumgartner, senior vice president and head global engineering at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, said Sanofi’s Modulus project includes a rare combination of “visionary design, operational brilliance, and a deep commitment to improving patient outcomes” that “not only meets the moment but defines the future.”

Liang Hong Koh, Singapore site head, Modulus Sanofi, thanked ISPE for the “tremendous recognition” to be selected as the overall 2026 FOYA. With the Modulus platform, he said Sanofi succeeded in the simultaneous design and construction of two facilities — a greenfield campus in Tuas and an expansion of its Neuville-sur-Saône site — that are adaptable and flexible in manufacturing.

Pointing to this year’s other FOYA category award winners, he commented that the biopharma industry “can achieve remarkable things when we challenge ourselves to do things differently and to think differently.”     

The banquet kicked off this year’s ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo in the Washington, D.C. area, with awards to category winners including AstraZeneca, BSP Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Hepalink Pharmaceutical Group, and Takeda — with honorable mention to Chugai Pharma Manufacturing and Fujifilm Biotechnologies. 

Bayer’s SOLIDA-1 site in Leverkusen, Germany won two separate FOYA awards — Operations – Operational Excellence and Pharma 4.0 — for its integration of modular design, end-to-end automation, and digital manufacturing architecture. The German site includes autonomous material flow and connected-data systems, improving equipment effectiveness and reducing manual intervention while supporting scalable oral solid dose production, according to ISPE.