Overlooking Lake Geneva and covering an area of 10,200 square metres, Ferring's new three-story building in St Prex combines Ferring's new headquarters with a production and logistics site.
Ferring intends to use the €90m facility not just to manufacture its drugs, but also to integrate its supply chain by limiting packaging and distribution to the St Prex site.
Currently, finished products are sent from every production site in Europe to 43 marketing and sales companies, resulting in a complicated and expensive network.
But from 2008 all bulk products will be sent to the St Prex plant where they will be packaged, stored and distributed.
"We have five main packaging lines; plastic bottles, secondary packaging, blister lines, stickpack, and multipurpose vials, ampoules and prefill syringes," Folke Flateland, Ferring's vice president of technical operations, told In-PharmaTechnologist.com.
"There is hard pressure on the cost of goods so we are also looking at how to improve the side of production that deals with raw materials and processing."
The company is particularly interested in continuous processing in sustained release solid dosage form for tablets and granules.
Pentasa (mesalazine) for example, for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), which is currently made in Denmark, will undergo closed process at the St Prex site in a horizontal fluid based dryer at 100Kg per hour.
In this way, there is less material handling, larger batches are processed and it is easier to scale up.
"With continuous processing, labour costs are obviously lower and you also get much less stop-and-go," Flateland said.
"We also have a pilot plant where we can experiment with solid dosage formulations under preparation using smaller equipment and batches, a small playground if you like."
The plant also features closed processing of peptides for oral administration, such as Minirin, Ferring's antidiuretic tablets.
The production facility began operations in April while the packaging facility started last September.
In addition to the 160 headquarters employees, a further 200 staff will work in production and logistics.
"At the moment there is one shift working in manufacturing but we are looking to increase that to three by the end of 2006," plant director Francois Hosotte said.
"By the end of the year we will also have all of our equipment, which is brand new and not moved from other sites, validated."
The plant has been certified for good manufacturing practice (GMP) packaging and is pending GMP approval from the Swiss authorities on primary production, while US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval is expected next year.
There is also 30 per cent free space in the site which has not yet been assigned to specific operations.
The St Prex plant is the latest addition to Ferring's manufacturing line; last summer the company bought BTG (Biotechnology General), the global biologics manufacturing business of Savient Pharmaceuticals, and integrated it into its operations in the beginning of 2006.