New Quality Facility in Swiftwater to Further Advance Sanofi Pasteur’s Vaccine Legacy

The ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new Quality building in Swiftwater is more than just a chance to celebrate our new facility with local dignitaries. It is yet another sign at Sanofi Pasteur that the demand for what we do, and more importantly, the way we do it continues to grow.

Given my role, of course I’m particularly passionate about the new Quality facility. This building sets us apart within the vaccines industry, providing us with the opportunity to reduce time to market for vaccines and to accept more products for review and testing on site.

The fact that Sanofi has invested $65 million to construct this building says something about our company and the future of the Swiftwater site. Often, companies focus their investments solely on new products and their manufacturing facilities, leaving the quality control facilities to get the last piece of the pie because it’s work they can contract out if they choose. But not here. Quality and safety are integrated into every aspect of our business.

This integration is more than a business strategy. In my nearly three decades of work here, I’ve been struck by the passion we have for quality and safety. This passion is embedded within our culture, as we strive to manufacture the highest quality vaccines for the people that need them.

Our commitment also goes far beyond words from management. It’s one thing for someone like me to talk about quality, but the only way to truly have effective quality is for everyone to be involved. This happens at the Swiftwater Site through our Quality Mindset Program.

Our quality focus plays an essential role in our efforts to produce vaccines to prevent infectious disease. For example, quality and safety checks account for about 70 percent of the time devoted to manufacturing and producing a seasonal flu vaccine. This includes quality control tests for purity, sterility and potency at each step in the manufacturing process, including careful inspection of vials and syringes before labeling, followed by review and release from our internal Batch Release department and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

As we move forward on next generation vaccines, it’s clear to me that at Swiftwater, we’ll continue to deliver no matter what the challenge. When the flu pandemic hit in 2009, we led the competition in getting vaccines to health care providers. When there were meningitis outbreaks, we were there. Over the years, we’ve always been a site that’s delivered. With these new facilities, it’s clear our company embraces how we do our jobs.

For each of us, the real reason we get up every day and come to work is to help protect public health. That’s what our vaccines do, and our Industrial Operations team within Sanofi Pasteur takes our responsibility very seriously to make sure the public gets vaccinated.

A lot has changed since I first joined the company in 1992. But a lot has stayed the same: the willingness to meet the challenge of a new flu vaccine each and every year, the cooperative spirit for getting the best vaccines to market and, most importantly, the pride we feel knowing what we do keeps millions of people around the world healthy.

By Ryan Riboldi, associate vice president of Quality Operations at Sanofi Pasteur U.S.