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Amgen opens AI-enabled Ohio biomanufacturing facility

CEO Bob Bradway rallies the manufacturing team at Amgen Ohio with a chant of “OH-IO.”

Earlier this year, NVIDIA and Amgen revealed plans to analyze one of the world’s largest human datasets using AI models trained on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD in Iceland. Now, Amgen is signaling its continued commitment to cutting-edge tech with a ribbon cutting for an advanced biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio.

Known as Amgen Ohio, the facility is designed to uphold the company’s reputation for quality and reliability. It will play a significant role in producing innovative biomedicines to address serious diseases, employing approximately 400 people across various roles.

The new facility “was designed with the latest innovation and technology to deliver safe, reliable medicines for ‘every patient, every time,’” said Bob Bradway, chairman and chief executive officer at Amgen.

Amge…

A brief guide to Pharma 4.0 adoption

View of a production line at the Reig Jofre company’s headquarters. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Pharma 4.0 projects may have gotten off to a slow start, but they have ramped up recently.

And many of such projects to date have been in the Big Pharma space, according to the CRB’s 2021 Life Sciences Horizons report. “It makes sense because a lot of these digital technologies have a big dollar sign with them and Big Pharma tends to have the funds for that,” said Yvonne Duckworth, senior automation engineer at CRB.

As adoption matures, more startups will likely embrace Pharma 4.0 technologies, Duckworth said. Even cash-strapped startups building new facilities could lay the groundwork for smart factory upgrades in the future. “It’s about being forward-thinking in designing new facilities,” Duckworth said.

[Related: Pharma 4.0: Industry 4.0 Applied t…

Exploring pharma applications of Xilinx’s adaptive system-on-modules

Image courtesy of Xilinx

Earlier this year, Xilinx (San Jose, Calif.) launched its Kria line of adaptive system-on-modules (SOMs) for a host of AI applications, including in factory and healthcare environments. In terms of the former, the SOMs target digital twin, predictive maintenance and defect detection applications.

SOMs, which are small embedded boards about the size of a credit card, enable the abstraction of hardware functionality. As a result, developers can design at the board level rather than the chip level. For hardware designers, SOMs promise to avoid rudimentary design work. SOMs also enable software developers to begin work in parallel with a hardware team.

Smart factory applications related to vision AI are a core focus area for the first product in the Xilinx SOM portfolio, the Kria K26 SOM.

As a result, factory owners deploying SOMs can get smart factory projects up and runni…

Pharma’s been slow to adopt Industry 4.0 — but that could change

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The pharma industry has been relatively slow to embrace concepts such as Industry 4.0, but COVID-19 is serving as a catalyst for sweeping changes within the industry.

The philosophy has roots in a German framework that prioritizes digitization to drive manufacturing efficiency, promising that cyber-physical systems will usher in the next industrial revolution. The Industry 4.0 framework spans connectivity, analytics and AI and integrated automation technologies.

But the deployment of Industry 4.0–inspired technologies has been uneven in the pharma industry. “The industry is pretty cautious,” said John Younes, COO of Litmus Automation, the developer of an industrial edge computing platform.

Get the full story from our sister site, Pharmaceutical Processing World.