GE and Emerson strike biopharma deal
23 Nov 2015
GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences business and Emerson Process Management have joined forces to improve productivity and efficiency in biopharmaceuticals production.
The companies will integrate Emerson’s DeltaV distributed control system (DCS) with GE Healthcare’s bioprocessing technologies for manufacture of monoclonal antibodies, vaccines and other biologics.
Biopharmaceuticals are medical products that have been manufactured in, semisynthesised from or extracted from biological sources.
According to GE, manufacturers are increasingly looking to automate biopharmaceutical production processes, driven by the industry need to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Emerson’s DeltaV system, which is already installed throughout the pharmaceutical industry, uses predictive technologies to enable remote monitoring and control from multiple locations across a company’s network.
The first DeltaV-driven GE Healthcare installation will be a FlexFactory - GE’s integrated manufacturing platform based on single-use technologies.
It is expected to be complete before the end of the year.
“We believe that the combination of Emerson’s automation technologies and the GE FlexFactory will offer superior process performance, consistency of product, and reduced validation time,” said Jerry Brown, senior vice president of industry solutions for Emerson Process Management.
