Steriline, an Italian manufacturer of robotic and standard fill/finish lines for the aseptic processing of injectable drugs, delivered to Fatro an compact robotic filling machine, to produce small batches of veterinary vaccines in single-dose pre-filled syringes (PFSs).
Fatro develops and produces medicines and vaccines for animals. In order to enter into the veterinary segment market that requires single-dose formats, the company decided to introduce into its fleet of machines a lean solution, equipped with a few components, that processes small batches of single-dose PFSs. The machine was supposed to occupy as little space as possible, to reduce the management costs of the grade B area the equipment would have to be housed in.
Steriline proposed a compact and flexible filling solution: a Robotic Nest Filling Machine (RNFM2) designed to manage 0.5 ml PFSs with a production capacity of up to 2,900 pieces per hour. With two manual loading and unloading stations, where an operator inserts tubs previously peeled under a Laminar Air Flow, the stand-alone solution is equipped with a robotic arm that picks up the nest in the tub containing the empty PFSs and positions it under the two filling heads connected to peristaltic pumps. Simultaneously to the filling process, two stoppering heads seal the filled PFSs. Once both processes are completed, the robotic arm repositions the nest in the tub at the exit station, ready for the operator to withdraw and transfer to the secondary packaging process.
The whole process therefore requires a small action area, which translates into the limited machine footprint (1.250 meters x 1.250 meters) under the open Restricted Access Barrier System (oRABS). The whole project, from the order to the product set-up, took one year. The Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) was completed in September 2022 without requiring any customer service intervention.
