Large Scale Cell Culture (LSCC) Facility in Vienna, Austria
Today’s plant, tomorrow’s products
The number of patients with serious diseases is increasing worldwide, and so is the market for innovative medicines. To help meet those needs and to make our supply chains more resilient, we have expanded our network with a new multi-product large scale cell culture facility: the LSCC in Vienna. The LSCC not only reflects Boehringer Ingelheim‘s commitment to biopharmaceuticals, but is also a testament to our unwavering dedication to patients worldwide.
This new GMP-certified biopharmaceutical multi-product facility is our fourth site worldwide for the production of cell culture-based biopharmaceuticals. It houses 48 bioreactors at a range of scales, with a total volume of 185,000 liters, increasing our worldwide mammalian large-scale capacity by 30%. From the outset, versatility was our goal; with its flexible line structures, the LSCC plays a key role in the reliable delivery of a variety of monoclonal antibodies, enzymes, and other recombinant proteins. High levels of automation and digitalization maximize output capacity, while stringent multi-product design allows rapid changeovers or simultaneous production of different products.
The numbers
The core LSCC complex consists of a main building, an annex, and a media building, with an energy plant, a logistics center and a QC/QA building also added to the site to support them. In terms of sheer numbers, it’s a very impressive facility:
For all its size, however, the LSCC has a remarkably small ecological footprint. It gets 100% of its external electricity supply from renewable sources: water, wind, biomass, geothermal, and solar. On the other side of the balance, it uses that energy more efficiently than ever, thanks to a comprehensive monitoring network for media generation and distribution, which lets us record energy flows and identify potential for improvements. A whole raft of measures on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, as well as frequency converter-driven centrifugal pumps in the pure media systems, also help us towards our goal: a carbon-neutral Boehringer Ingelheim by 2030.
Technology in service of efficiency
Smart use of modeling and simulations supports faster, seamless, and robust process transfer; collaborating with the University of Hamburg-Harburg, we used computational fluid dynamics in a transparent bioreactor to study mixing behavior and generate data for development of models. Meanwhile, our BioMES system enables flexible product flow management via large, plug-in panels that automatically initiate key processes.
Fast changeovers are supported by a range of innovations, like hovercraft transport and custom elevators for chromatography columns and other heavy equipment, and an integrated system for cleaning- and sterilization-in-place without disassembly.
Safe and secure
Our customers rely on us to safeguard their data security, and we take that seriously. Integrated user and account management for authorizations, combined with integration in the Boehringer Ingelheim domain and corporate ID badges for authentication, ensures that only authorized staff can access the production controls or the information passing through them.
Meeting tomorrow’s needs
Predicting the future needs of biologics manufacturing drove us to take an innovative approach in concept, planning, design and fit-out alike. All we have learned in over thirty years of cell culture manufacturing was integrated from the very start. In the words of Ingo Delbrück, Vienna’s Head of Focused Factory Cell Culture:
“Facilities like this have a lifetime of around forty years. We have a lot of experience and expertise in what we do, so we’re confident of anticipating operational trends. We build a facility today to manufacture the products of tomorrow – even though we don’t yet know what they are!”