Copenhagen, Denmark, April 9: With its deep expertise in separation, heat transfer and fluid handling, Alfa Laval is ideally placed to partner with pharmaceutical production pace-setters to improve profitability, accessibility and competitiveness, promote social responsibility and reduce environmental impact. Its global presence enables Alfa Laval to assist pharmaceutical producers in their efforts to optimize their global supply chains.
As part of this strategic direction, Alfa Laval has implemented a transformation of its organization to establish the Food & Pharma Division and pioneer positive impact in life-essential industries. Set on helping billions of people get the safe medicine they deserve, Alfa Laval is substantially reinforcing its pharma workforce and committing a significant additional investment into R&D and operations over the next four years.
“Secure supplies of safe and affordable medicine are needed now more than ever before. At Alfa Laval, we are committed to pioneering and empowering the pharmaceutical industry to push the boundaries of speed and scalability,” says Sammy Hulpiau, President Alfa Laval Food & Pharma Division.
The new structure has been designed to support pharmaceutical operators in tackling a range of challenges: optimizing the production of the rapidly increasing generic and biosimilar medicines while maximizing the patent window of patented medicines when a company benefits from a price premium. This comes on top of a pressing requirement to optimize productivity, sharpen competitiveness, secure compliance, mitigate risks, and build supply chain resilience.
“With our embedded expertise and industry-leading pharmaceutical manufacturing solutions, we will support customers to innovate and produce the medicine of tomorrow, improving health, resilience, longevity and accessibility for a growing and ageing global population,” says Sammy Hulpiau.
Delivering in a world of disruption
Against a backdrop of fierce competition, erratic climate change, and geopolitical turbulence, the pharmaceutical industry is continuously adapting to disruption in markets, supply chains, demographics, regulations, and the environment. It is in these hectic conditions that Alfa Laval thrives, with a proven 140-year reputation for leading the way, through world-class knowledge and experience.
“With class leading technologies and the expertise to apply these solutions to pharmaceutical production, we empower our customers to continuously optimize their processes and achieve a superior TCO and ROI,” says Doug Osman, Strategic Business Developer, Alfa Laval Pharma. “We also have the capacity and commitment for collaborative development to scale up innovations to industrial production quickly, while increasing patent windows and supporting swift regulatory approvals.”
Minimized environmental impact
Alfa Laval has a strong drive to minimize environmental impacts across all the industries in which it operates and leverages its multi-discipline expertise to ensure customers maximize resources and lessen the impact to the environment and local communities. Water efficiency is a practice that has taken up a particularly prominent space in the new Food & Pharma Division, as it is a key focal point in both industries.
“Pharmaceutical production is typically extremely water intensive and is also subject to a number of growing regulations worldwide, driving it to reduce the release of pharmaceutical residues in its wastewater to zero. Thanks to Alfa Laval’s long engagement and expertise in the water sector, we continuously help pharmaceutical producers to enhance water reuse to safeguard water security and comply with regulations for industrial outlet,” says Eline Suijlen, Water Industry & Strategic Partnership Manager at Alfa Laval.
Inflection point
The Covid pandemic proved an inflection point for the pharma industry and also for Alfa Laval in the joint effort to seemingly achieve the impossible and develop new medicine at an unprecedented pace – all in the name of saving lives.
“In this demanding development environment, we – like many others – were forced to employ new methods to achieve the results desperately needed. It changed our approach to single-use equipment, for example, and how this may be applied to drastically speed up R&D, because of the inherent flexibility and rapid prototyping of single-use systems. We now enjoy the benefits of these learnings as a more capable organization as we face up to new challenges with respect to demographics, geopolitics and climate change ,” says Doug Osman.
Following the Covid pandemic, the UN adjusted its assessment of global demographics in 2024, recording that the population is projected to grow to more than 10 billion people by 2060, with the share of people aged 65 or older expected to double to 20% in that time, while a growing middle class boosting the demand for new, affordable and specialized medicines (UN, 2024).
For pharmaceutical companies this brings a number of challenges demanding reliability, agility and resilience, with increased investment in R&D putting pressure on profitability, global supply chains facing more stress-testing from geopolitical tensions, and regulatory and environmental regulations becoming ever stricter.
Doug Osman says: “We are acutely aware of the challenges that the industry faces. At Alfa Laval we have the experience, expertise, and with our new Food & Pharma Divisional structure, we are well equipped to support customers and take on these challenges successfully.”
