Month: January 2021

Two years ago, Nephron Pharmaceuticals brought a problem to the engineering and pharmacy colleges at the University of South Carolina.

When employees operating machinery at Nephron called in sick or otherwise couldn’t come to work, production is halted. Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy hoped the company and the two colleges could find a solution.

Kennedy is no stranger to the university, having graduated from USC. She and her husband Bill also established the Kennedy Pharmacy Innovation Center in conjunction with the USC School of Pharmacy.

However, she had not been a part of a collaboration with the university that actually shifted the way the West Columbia drug manufacturer operates.

After several classes of mechanical engineering students and pharmacy students worked to fix the problem, the project was finally completed this year— a robot named Smithers after The Simpsons character. The robot improves productivity by cutting out most of the human involvement in pre-filling sterile syringes with injectable medicines.

While Nephron has faster robots than Smithers, they require more human intervention.

“It just continues to make drugs without, frankly, a bathroom break or other things. So a steady machine, even if it’s slower, is better than people who haven’t shown up for the night and we have orders to fill,” Kennedy said.

Despite increased automation, Kennedy said employment will not be hurt. Nephron is currently in a hiring surge, trying to fill 380 positions including sterile pharmacy technicians and automation engineers. This year, Nephron will open its state-of-the-art vaccine production facility as part of a $215 million expansion.

“I can’t hire enough sterile pharmacy techs for what I need fast enough because of our growth, so this is just augmenting what we’re already doing— not to replace humans,” Kennedy said.

The robot consists of four pieces of equipment, all designed by students, that work together to mimic the actions of a human pre-filling sterile syringes, according to Nephron’s chief of engineering and USC mechanical engineering professor Ramy Harik. Separate pieces pick up the syringes, complete the filling process and cap the syringes to seal them.

Harik led three different teams of senior engineering students over two years to create the robot, while pharmacy students made sure the medical and sterilization aspects of the robot was safe for future human injection. The teams tested nearly ten different designs before finding one that worked.

The machine, which was installed last week, is being validated for commercial use and should be up and running in a couple of weeks, said Kennedy. She has already ordered the parts to make another one to put into production and hopes to have several of them going at the same time one day.

“My dream for the university is that we could commercially market these robots for hospitals around the world,” said Kennedy. “If we had the ultimate dream, it would be to sell these and a portion of the proceeds go back to the pharmacy and engineering school and allow us to endow a scholarship for future research.”

From the partnership, Harik created a pharmaceutical manufacturing class at USC for the next semester, and Nephron donated the equipment needed for students in the form of a glass cleanroom. The room allows students to work in a sterile environment for pharmacy manufacturing.

“Usually an entry-level engineer wouldn’t be given the opportunity to build an entire system from the ground up and it’s just been a great opportunity,” said John Diamond, one of the engineering students who started the project and now works at Nephron.

The entire story by Laurryn Salem is available here.
 

LISTEN: https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/post/west-columbia-company-use-robots-help-produce-injectible-meds

At the growing campus of Nephron Pharmaceuticals in West Columbia, many robots are used for a variety of functions, such as moving pallets of wrapped products and many other purposes.  A new type of robot is joining the line, thanks to a partnership between Nephron and the University of South Carolina’s colleges of engineering and pharmacy.  

Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy said the new robots will be used to pre-fill sterile syringes with a variety of injectable medicines quickly and efficiently.  While she lauds the reliability of robots who, unlike humans, don’t get sick, pregnant or have accidents that keep them out of work, she is quick to point out that the reason for using robots is not to replace humans.  On the contrary, she said, “if anything, we’ve got a cooler thing for the human to do in operating the equipment versus maybe doing something with their human hands.  So what I’m excited about is we’ll be expanding their education and training, but we can also expand our capabilities.”

To underscore the point, Kennedy said the company is adding four new buildings to its complex and plans to hire 350 new employees to expand the business.  Dr. Ramy Harik, who serves USC as a professor of mechanical engineering and also as Nephron’s chief of manufacturing, said the company and the colleges make a natural partnership.  “That concept of an engineer is, try to make the world a better place by creating inventions and creating systems that can help people’s lives and can help society.  What better project than collaborating with the College of Pharmacy, that you’re touching directly on patients’ lives?”

One significant way to help save lives these days is by fighting COVID, and Kennedy hopes to use the robots to fill syringes with COVID vaccine if she can collaborate with one of the producers.  “What I hope to do is find a partner, whether it’s Phizer or Moderna, Johnson & Johnson or Astro Zeneca.  I’m hopeful that they’ll say ‘hey, we need to add or expand capacity.’  I can put those vaccines in plastic ampules and so I’m actively looking for a partner that says ‘here, can you fill these for us?'”

Harik’s goal is for the robots to fill a syringe in 5 seconds or less.  “I think this is something that is attainable” after doing studies and re-studies on the process, he said.  That figures out to more than 17,000 filled syringes every 24 hours for each robot.  Kennedy added that because she looks at Nephron as a big family, the company had a little fun with a name-the-robots contest – which the engineers won – and made the robots a family, with the result that “all of our robotics to deal with syringe or bag filling are named for Simpsons family characters.  So we have Bart, Lisa, Marge, Maggie and Homer.”  Of another, “I’m thinking this one could be Mr. Smithers,” she chuckled.   

The robots are made by a Japanese company using the designs of USC engineering students under Harik’s direction.  After Nephron gets all it needs, Kennedy has an idea to continue producing them for hospitals and other facilities with an eye to continuing the USC connection into the future.  “My goal would be if we could find a way to sell these, that there would always be some portion of the selling price going back to the pharmacy school and the engineering school as a way to sort of potentially endow a scholarship for a bright student that might do some great project in his or her career.” 

The robots have just been installed, and Kennedy said by February they should be operational and making medicinal products that can be shipped nationwide to help people with a variety of ailments.