No Day at the Beach

Large and Complex Equipment Installed at Oceanside Plant

A 500,000-sq.-ft. pharmaceutical manufacturing plant for Biogen Idec Inc. is being fitted with several 15,000-liter tanks and 50-ft.-long access platforms, all with a myriad of nozzles, valves, piping and wires. DPR Construction is scheduled to complete the $400 million campus at the end of the year.

By Greg Aragon

	PHOTO COURTESY OF DPR CONSTRUCTION

Construction of the first large-scale biotech manufacturing facility in Oceanside will be completed by the end of the year.

Costing nearly $400 million to build, San Diego-based Biogen Idec Inc.'s (formerly IDEC Pharmaceuticals Inc.) new plant will manufacture and distribute drugs that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The 500,000-sq.-ft. campus is expected to employ approximately 1,200 people. It consists of six buildings spread over a 60-acre site, about 30 mi. north of San Diego.

The first five structures were completed last year. They include: a 32,000-sq.-ft. operations building; 14,000-sq.-ft. central corridor, or "spine" building that links all six buildings; 70,000-sq.-ft. GMP warehouse; three-story, 120,000-sq.-ft. laboratory/office building; and 65,000-sq.-ft. central utilities building.

The design/build team, led by Redwood City-based DPR Construction and San Diego-based McGraw/Baldwin Architects, is now concentrating on the facility's centerpiece-a 210,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing building-dubbed NIMO 1.

"It is the largest, most complicated, high-value building of them all," said Ben Meyers, DPR's construction manager. "It will be filled with clean rooms, stainless-steel vessels (large steel tanks used in drug labs), processing equipment and has taken take two years to complete."

advertisement

Standing three-stories tall, NIMO 1 is currently going through punch-list items and is scheduled to be completed on Dec. 31, the date that the entire project will be turned over to the owner.

The high-tech building required 80 large process equipment machines, some with 15,000-liter tanks, and 50-ft.-long access platforms, all with a myriad of nozzles, valves, piping, wires and other gizmos. Each machine was designed and built off-site in places such as England, Germany, Canada, and the Midwest, and then shipped in large crates to the job.

Meyers said that assembling these modular units and finding room for all of them under one roof was the biggest hurdle his crew had to clear.

"It [was like] building a ship in a bottle," added Meyers, who joined DPR two years ago. "The space was all spoken for."

He said that it was a painstakingly precise, two- to three-week process to assemble each machine and make sure that every part lined up and fit exactly.

"Every single morning we [had] a start-up and hook-up meeting that [went] through all the details of the day, what vessels came in, what pieces had to be worked on and prepared next."

Katie Jeremiah, DPR's project engineer, said that meetings were pulled together "within minutes when an issue came up," allowing the project to keep moving.

	The high-tech building required 80 large process equipment machines, some with 15,000-liter tanks, and 50-ft.-long access platforms. Each machine was designed and built off-site in places such as England, Germany, Canada and the midwestern United States, and then shipped in large crates to the job (photos courtesy of DPR Construction).

Over the course of the 30-month schedule, the project used 25,000 yds. of concrete, 7,000 tons of structural steel, 210 mi. of wire and conduit and 61 mi. of piping. But with the abundant use of glass and aluminum, the modern-styled campus looks more like an office complex than a world-class drug facility.

"You would not think it was a manufacturing building if you saw it," said David Cummins, McGraw/Baldwin's project manager. "Its curtain wall-type construction will blend in with the office buildings, laboratories and vernacular of the San Diego area."

When the project began, Biogen Idec did not have a detailed process outlined for the engineers to work with.

"At the time, [Biogen Idec] had never built a manufacturing facility of this scale and they didn't have a particular product that they were going to manufacture in the facility," said Sean Eickhoff, project manager for Kansas City-based Clark, Richardson & Biskup, the project's consulting engineers, responsible for the process engineering design and also setting the program for the mechanical, electrical and plumbing design. "They had a lot of things in their pipeline that were in development in different phases of FDA trials, [but] it was more speculative at the time."

He said that it was a task to develop a design that could accommodate different processes and various potential drugs without creating a "bottleneck" in that process.

"The whole flexibility issue in not knowing which particular drug was going to get approved first was a challenge," said Eickhoff added.

In the end, Eickhoff said that CRB designed "a generic, middle-of-the-road type deal" that was flexible enough for easy modification.