Inside Sanofi’s 2026 ISPE Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) Innovation – Facility of the Future Category Award-Winning Project: Modulus

Located in Neuville-sur-Saône, France, and Tuas, Singapore, the twin Modulus facilities were designed and built simultaneously using a standardized global architecture. Each facility spans approximately 258,000 square feet and was developed with a bold mission: to create a replicable manufacturing platform capable of rapidly switching between therapies, accelerating deployment timelines, maintaining product quality, and delivering essential medicines to patients faster around the world.

Why Sanofi Won

Over the past two decades, the growth of biologics and monoclonal antibody therapies drove the pharmaceutical industry toward large-scale, highly specialized manufacturing facilities. While effective for high-volume production, these traditional facilities were often designed around a single product or platform, making them difficult and costly to adapt to new therapies.

The emergence of novel modalities, including mRNA vaccines, viral vectors, recombinant proteins, and personalized treatments, highlighted the limitations of this fixed manufacturing model. The COVID-19 pandemic further demonstrated the need for facilities that could rapidly adapt to changing healthcare demands. Sanofi created Modulus to address this challenge.

What makes Modulus particularly remarkable is that Sanofi successfully designed and delivered two nearly identical facilities simultaneously, despite being separated by more than 10,000 kilometers. One facility was built as a greenfield project in Singapore, while the other was developed within an existing brownfield site in France. Through standardized design principles, the company established a globally replicable manufacturing platform that maintains consistency in quality, compliance, and operational performance while allowing regional adaptations where necessary.

This achievement provides a blueprint for the next generation of pharmaceutical facilities, reducing project risk, accelerating deployment, and creating a standardized framework that can be replicated globally. As Benjamin Chia, Head of Global Engineering and Maintenance, Vaccines and Project Delivery at Sanofi, noted, Modulus is no longer a concept: it is an operational manufacturing platform that is already demonstrating new possibilities for the biopharmaceutical industry.

Flexible Plug-and-Produce Manufacturing

At the center of the Modulus concept is an innovative plug-and-produce manufacturing model.

Traditional facilities typically rely on fixed infrastructure and dedicated equipment designed for a specific process. Changing to a different product often requires extensive renovations, lengthy validation activities, and significant downtime. Modulus takes a fundamentally different approach.

The facilities feature modular manufacturing ballrooms equipped with standardized docking stations that allow equipment and process platforms to be exchanged quickly and efficiently. Rather than rebuilding infrastructure, teams can reconfigure production pods using pre-validated equipment and single-use assemblies tailored to a specific therapy or manufacturing platform.

One of the most impressive accomplishments of the Modulus platform is its ability to transition between manufacturing technologies in as little as seven to 10 days. For example, a production area can be converted from mRNA vaccine manufacturing to monoclonal antibody production within this timeframe; a process that would typically require several months in a conventional facility.

This flexibility enables Sanofi to manufacture a broad range of biologics, including:

• Vaccines
• mRNA therapies
• Viral vectors
• Recombinant proteins
• Enzymes
• Monoclonal antibodies

The facilities contain 34 production pods, each equipped with standardized interfaces for utilities, services, process equipment, and digital connectivity. The result is a highly adaptable manufacturing environment that can evolve alongside future therapeutic innovations without requiring major capital investments.

Single-Use Technology Accelerates Changeovers

A key enabler of Modulus’s agility is its extensive adoption of single-use technology.

In traditional stainless-steel facilities, switching between products requires complex cleaning procedures, sterilization processes, cleaning validation, and contamination-control measures. These activities contribute significantly to downtime and operational complexity.

By integrating single-use systems throughout the facilities, Sanofi eliminates many of these requirements. Disposable process components can be removed and replaced quickly, dramatically reducing the time required to prepare manufacturing spaces for new products.

Beyond accelerating changeovers, single-use technology also enhances biosafety and reduces cross-contamination risks; a critical consideration in a facility producing multiple products simultaneously. The combination of modular pod architecture and single-use technology creates a manufacturing environment that is cleaner, faster, and more adaptable than conventional biomanufacturing facilities.

Pharma 4.0™ and AI-Enabled Operations

The physical flexibility of Modulus is supported by a robust digital infrastructure built around Pharma 4.0 principles. Both sites utilize a comprehensive digital twin platform that enables real-time monitoring of operations, predictive maintenance strategies, and seamless integration between information technology and operational technology systems.

This digital backbone provides operators and engineers with unprecedented visibility into manufacturing performance. AI-driven analytics, connected sensors, and real-time process intelligence help teams monitor equipment status, optimize production activities, and support rapid changeovers with greater confidence.

According to Sanofi, the digital platform allows teams to perform qualification activities more efficiently, identify potential issues before they impact production, and reduce the likelihood of errors that could delay manufacturing transitions. The facilities also incorporate advanced automation technologies, including:

• Autonomous mobile robots for material movement
• Automated dock-to-shipping logistics
• Standardized tote handling systems
• Semi-automated kitting operations
• Robotic UV decontamination systems
• Automated waste management

Together, these technologies streamline operations while reducing manual handling, improving biosafety, and enhancing manufacturing reliability.

Adaptive Spaces Designed for Multiple Platforms

Another defining characteristic of Modulus is its ability to support multiple manufacturing platforms within the same facility. The facilities utilize mobile modular partitions that can be repositioned to create different containment zones as production needs evolve. Advanced HVAC zoning systems automatically adapt to new room configurations while maintaining stringent regulatory, environmental, and biosafety requirements.

This flexible design enables Sanofi to operate six different production platforms within the same manufacturing footprint, accommodating both traditional stainless-steel equipment and modern single-use systems. The result is a facility capable of supporting current therapies while remaining prepared for future modalities that may not yet exist.

Building a Globally Replicable Model

The Modulus journey began in 2018 when a small group of Sanofi colleagues challenged conventional thinking and asked a simple question: What if biopharmaceutical manufacturing could be completely redesigned from the ground up? Without an existing blueprint to follow, the team developed a vision centered on flexibility, speed, scalability, and digitalization. That vision ultimately became the twin facilities now operating in Singapore and France.

Today, Modulus serves as a cornerstone of Sanofi’s global manufacturing strategy. The facilities strengthen the company’s ability to respond to healthcare needs, improve pandemic preparedness, and deploy manufacturing capacity more rapidly across regions. Most importantly, the standardized architecture creates a framework that can be replicated globally, offering the pharmaceutical industry a practical model for future facilities that prioritize agility and resilience.

A New Standard for the Facility of the Future

By earning the 2026 ISPE FOYA Innovation – Facility of the Future Category Award, Sanofi has demonstrated how modular design, digital technologies, AI-enabled operations, and flexible manufacturing platforms can work together to transform biopharmaceutical production.

Modulus is more than a manufacturing facility. It is a new operating model for the industry; one that reduces changeover times from months to days, enables simultaneous production of multiple therapies, and creates a scalable blueprint for future global manufacturing networks.

As healthcare needs continue to evolve, facilities like Modulus will play an increasingly important role in ensuring patients have faster access to life-changing vaccines and therapies. Through this pioneering project, Sanofi has established a compelling vision for the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing and a new benchmark for what a facility of the future can achieve.

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