Crocker operates the controls and checks the gauges of a 400-liter tank that is part of the production process.
Crocker tucks the respirator hood into the body of his suit.
ment have gone into the pharmaceutical ingredients. To start working on a new drug, he pores over what’s called a batch order — a very specific recipe — coming from clients such as pharmaceutical giants Merck, Eli Lilly or Pfizer. Many times during the multiday process, Crocker must don personal protective equipment — an outfit that’s something like a hazmat suit. He pulls an unused protective suit from its plastic packaging, and attaches a hose from a respirator hood to the air-filtering fan that he will strap to his back. He steps into the full-body Tyvek suit and zips it up. He pulls the protective hood over his head and tucks it into the collar of the suit, peering through a plastic window in front of his eyes. Then, with another operator to verify accuracy, he measures out active pharmaceutical ingredients (specifics of which they cannot disclose) and binding ingredients from bulk drums. The operators measure various powders underneath a vacuum, or fume hood, which will suck away any particles that float around. Not all the products they handle are dangerous, Crocker said, but some are, so operators take precautions all the time. The next step, in a different room, involves filling tanks with solvents such as acetone or methanol, which will dissolve the active
HIGH DESERT PULSE • SPRING / SUMMER 2012
pharmaceutical ingredients into a liquid solution. The resulting liquid gets pumped into a chamber with hot gas that atomizes the solution into a powder.
Spray-dried dispersion The powder is spread onto trays, stacked onto racks and rolled into a tray-drying machine, much like a giant oven. The drying process removes any last bit of solvent from the powder — which is now a pharmaceutical product — so people don’t ingest it. Crocker and his coworkers are making what are called spray-dried dispersions, using technology that Bend Research developed in the mid-1990s to improve the bioavailability of drugs that had low solubility in water, said Deperro, the general manager. Bioavailability refers to the amount of the drug that’s physiologically effective to the body. If active pharmaceutical ingredients were simply compressed into a tablet — without being dissolved and mixed with other ingredients and atomized — they wouldn’t be as bioavailable, Crocker said. Certain pharmaceutical ingredients probably wouldn’t even get used for medicines. An estimated 60 percent of compounds in early development as
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