Sanofi will build a factory in virtual space that will operate during an epidemic and produce vaccines to accelerate the development of vaccines
Dassault Systèmes and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced a collaboration to improve and optimize the production system in the "EVolutive Facility" project - a sophisticated and modular plant that Sanofi is going to build in France and Singapore.
As part of this cooperation, part of a long-standing tradition of cooperation between the companies in the fields of health and life sciences, the virtual twinning experience will be used to ensure flexible and efficient work in factories, and to help Sanofi realize its vision and establish its product portfolio.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to qualify their facilities, equipment and production processes, before production begins, to ensure quality and safety. This is something that may take weeks and months, depending on the equipment, the processes needed for production and the composition of the product. The virtual twins allow the manufacturers to standardize the models, speed up the schedules and perfect their ability to produce necessary treatments quickly and on a large scale.
Sanofi will use Dassault Systèmes' solution for industry"Made to Cure for BioPharma", based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, to plan, execute, train and manage modular production lines in both factories as part of the "EVolutive Facilities" project, which will operate with Single Use Technology with the ability to produce up to 4 products simultaneously, in energy-efficient processes for sustainable production .
The platform provides a virtual environment that enables collaborative invention and innovation, and end-to-end information management throughout the entire life cycle.
Sanofi will be able to virtually experience its production systems in the development phase, to optimize scaling and production processes, before launching work in the factory.
"We want to improve people's quality of life by making vaccines and treatments quickly available, while reducing the impact of our work on the environment." said Anna Alves, global manager of the EVolutive Facility project at Sanofi. "Dassault Systèmes provides the technology we need to accelerate the development of new products at the factory. Technology allows our teams to work collaboratively and bring our designs and models closer to standardization.
This technology will help us achieve the goal we set - to produce several products in EVF through schedule optimization, thanks to the digital twin. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform will help us deal with the complexity of managing the product life cycle in our manufacturing environment, which is subject to strict regulations, all for the benefit of our patients.
Through the virtual twin, Sanofi can simulate and visualize the recipe (for the production of a drug), the equipment and consumables needed in each project, and the work process along various modules and operators in the "bolerum" area, an area with flexibility and adaptive capacity, which allows manufacturers to change processes quickly.
Sanofi can easily add, remove and replace different functional elements and production steps. It can accelerate the main operations in the lifecycle of modules, processes and facilities more quickly, and catalog them in lifecycle management for reuse for faster production, also for other products.
"The pandemic has taught us that biopharma must maximize efficiency and quickly deliver high-quality innovative therapies to patients around the world," said Claire Beut, Vice President of Life Sciences Industries, Dassault Systèmes.
