Hi!
I’m Ilmari Niiranen and I have spent this summer at Fermion as a Pilot Plant Trainee. Our Pilot Plant is a small-scale factory where production processes can be tested with equipment of industry-scale production. Fermion’s pilot plant focuses on process development and produces small amounts of API batches for clinical trials. I ended up as a Phase1 trainee partly due to my studies in chemical engineering, which I will be continuing for the fifth year in the coming fall.
My assignments as a Pilot Plant Trainee have this far combined pure office work with concrete, hands-on tasks, so I haven’t had to just sit in front of a screen. The practical process is never far, and my workdays are quite versatile. From equipment purchases to updating work instructions, and from risk assessments to mapping emission measurements, the tasks have been diverse.
To my delight, I have noticed that my studies in chemical engineering have been directly beneficial in my work tasks. From the academic side, I have received good tools for interpreting diagrams, understanding processes holistically, and of course, for operating Excel. As a soon-to-be fifth-year engineering student, I have realized that one can rarely escape from Excel.
So, what do we do at a pilot-scale factory? One of the key tasks is to scale up development work from the laboratory level to industrial scale. What is developed in the laboratory must be tested with the right kind of process equipment before moving to a larger production scale. The pilot develops processes used to create the most crucial part of medicines, namely the active pharmaceutical ingredients, APIs. This is a simplified explanation, as the development of processes and products is in practice even more complex, and at this stage of my career, I am not yet fully aware of it. My work remains interesting as there is always something new to learn. In my opinion, you are supposed to always learn from your work.
The level of precision has made the work meaningful
What have I gained from this summer so far? Perhaps most importantly, I have had my first experiences in the pharmaceutical industry, and from the perspective of my own field of study none the less. In the pilot plant, tubes, reactors, and pumps have been a concrete presence. The distinctive features of this field include the precise quality requirements for the end product and the processes aimed at it. There is plenty to verify and validate, and the methods used for quality assurance must be proven suitable for the purpose, and their outputs must be precise.
Compared to my previous work experiences, the level of precision required for the work and its results at Fermion surprised me. Everything that is done in the pilot plant and product development is documented meticulously. For a future engineer like me, who appreciates systems and logic, this has been meaningful.
During this summer, it has been interesting to see how work at the pilot plant is a part of the overall process development, and a part of Fermion’s and Orion’s value chains. Without process development, the production of APIs does not evolve and solutions that could make production more efficient, environmentally friendly and safe can be missed. In the end, this job is just chemistry and engineering, and very precise, as the end-customers of the process are people whose safety is the highest priority.
Ilmari
