Tippecanoe Laboratories, affectionally known as “Tippe” is the second largest Evonik manufacturing site in North America with nearly 700 employees. Starting production in 1954 with just natural fermentation in large molecule manufacturing, Tippe now is a production facility that utilizes fermentation and chemical synthesis processes for the manufacture of many products from a scale of 30-gallon reactors in the kilo-scale pilot plant to 65,000-gallon fermentors! The manufacturing units at the site follow cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practices) to develop and manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients, including highly potent ones for cancer medications.
In 2022, Tippe was named the future home to a new, highly flexible, global-scale production facility for pharmaceutical lipids in the United States. This 220 million dollar project will create a new facility at the site with four production trains and a scale of processing vessels in the 15-gallon to 1,000-gallon range. Evonik Health Care gains the capability of rapidly producing high volumes of lipids in the case of a pandemic and furthers its strategy of delivering products and services along the entire drug delivery value chain for cell and gene therapies.
The 36-month-long project has a large, international project team with members in every discipline. This investment will have a dramatic impact on society with the U.S. government funding the facility with up to US $150 million through its Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a component of the Office of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The project team is looking for motivated talent to join the group and drive this rewarding project through the finish line.