Meadowpine Facility

The Challenge:

Hemosol Inc. focuses primarily on the development and manufacture of blood related protein based therapeutic products. Faced with the pressing challenge of introducing their new blood substitute Hemolink to the market, NXL led the design of Hemosol’s 3 storey, 130,000 sf facility, while integrating two separate design-build teams. The facility included a large-scale biopharmaceutical manufacturing area, discovery and quality control laboratories, warehousing and corporate offices and training centre.

Achieving a Successful Outcome:

The main design objective throughout the facility was to optimize personnel and product flows segregating clean and dirty, while stacking utility support above and below the manufacturing floor.

• The ground floor manufacturing area was organized into pressure zones based on clean corridor concepts, and included Class 100,000, 1 000, 100 and 10 clean room manufacturing areas, a containment (stale-dated human blood) suite, sterile (aseptic) filling suite, equipment wash and terminal hepafiltration throughout.
• The design was organized around large-scale process skid equipment, and all the utility connections that made it function. The building structure and envelope was designed with removable panels, and large floor openings to move the equipment in or out, providing long-term flexibility.
• The design also included complete expandability in the production module, multi-storey vertical service chase to organize the extensive process piping and mechanical utilities, as well as lower life-cycle maintenance costs with easy access for the maintenance. This built in flexibility has allowed the facility to be re-purposed as a contract manufacturing operation for the current owners.