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The LIFE ENGINEERING ethos

We all like to blame big pharma monopolies, but the problem is so much more complicated. Investments in research and responsibilities to shareholders often dictate the cost of medicine, even the life-saving variety. Organisations like WHO, the Gates Foundation, CRDF, among others do stellar work to bring affordable drugs to at-risk populations, but it isn't enough. It will never be enough unless we ensure that every country in the world has its own pharmaceutical manufacturing capability.

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To me, it is one of the most obvious solutions: building indigenous pharmaceutical capability will make medicines more affordable and accessible everywhere. By sharing technology, by building indigenous manufacturing capability, we can enable countries across the world to be self-sufficient. They will have the resources they need to contain local disease patterns through indigenous production, to save lives, to bring down the cost of healthcare. This is the very ethos of life engineering.

As an organisation, and as individuals, Fabtech is defined by a singular purpose: to save lives.

It sounds strange, I know. A pharmaceutical engineering company who wants to save lives. I can see your bemused expression as you read this. Heck, you might even be thinking, shouldn't they have all become doctors instead?

We are not doctors. We are not researchers. We are not pharmacists. But we are a small, yet vital piece of the vast pharmaceutical ecosystem. As an organisation, we are driven to be agents of positive change; to evolve the life sciences landscape; to build indigenous capability in regions that have none; to ensure that everyone, wherever they are in the world, has the same access to life-saving drugs at reasonable prices.

The work we do to build pharmaceutical capability gives doctors, researchers, lab techs and pharmacists their wings.

It is why we call ourselves LIFE ENGINEERS.

And we live our mission and our beliefs every day.

The knowledge that you've done something for someone else is a powerful reward and one that we hold on to as we bring our mission to life.

With every new project we take on, we reset the future. We will make a difference. Will you join us?

This post was originally posted on LinkedIn on February 4, 2018.

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  • The process. What you will make, in what dosage form, and at about what scale. For example: tablets, capsules, liquids, sterile injectables, API or biologics. Your answer changes almost every later step of the project.
  • The containment requirement. If the material is potent, tell us its OEB band. OEB (occupational exposure band) is a grade that shows how little of a material a worker can safely be exposed to. This one figure decides if you need a booth, an isolator or a contained suite. Their costs differ by an order of magnitude, which means about ten times.
  • The market. Tell us which regulator will inspect the facility. Also tell us the electrical supply at the site: 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The format of the documents and the specification of the equipment both depend on this.
  • The state of the site. Greenfield (an empty plot), brownfield (a site used before), an extension, or a retrofit into a running plant. A retrofit means new work inside a plant that is still in production. It is a different engineering problem from an empty plot, and usually a harder one.
  • Your timeline. Include any regulatory or commercial date the project has to meet.

For a single piece of equipment rather than a facility, tell us four things: the machine, the material, the throughput and the destination market. Throughput is how much material the machine must process in a set time.

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