Novo Nordisk

At Novo Nordisk Manufacturing in Kalundborg, we have 50 years of expertise in biomanufacturing. Today, our 3,200 employees produce half of the world’s insulin and a number of biopharmaceutical products. Furthermore, our finished product sections assemble and pack diabetes and biopharmaceutical products. Novo Nordisk invests more than 17 billion DKK in three new manufacturing facilities and expansion of an existing facility in Kalundborg, Denmark. This will establish additional capacity across the entire value chain from manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients to assembly and packaging. With the investment, 400 new jobs will be created.

Continuous improvement and innovation

In our existing factories, we are already dedicated to continuously improving and innovating our process.

New technology to be developed

The new facilities will include state-of-the-art production technologies, which will be bridged with more than 50 years of experience in biomanufacturing. As part of the conceptual design of the new API factories, we have included the well-proven new technologies which we have implemented in the existing API factories, in recent years. On top of that, we have identified 20 manufacturing processes, for which we will develop state-of-the-art new technologies to establish a high level of data connectivity and automation, using state-of-the-art software and hardware.

Reduction of energy and water

In addition, the conceptual design of our new API factories is expected to enable us to achieve a significant reduction in energy and water consumption, compared to our existing factories. This will be realized by several concrete initiatives, such as optimized water treatment, and optimized cleaning in place process of manufacturing equipment. In addition, we will implement water and energy reducing initiatives through implementation of new technology in the actual manufacturing process.

All the above scenarios hold great opportunities for MSc. thesis students to be part of our exciting journey and help establish the future factories of Novo Nordisk and to innovate our existing factories.

We will identify MSc. thesis opportunities within the following topics:

• Upstream, fermentation processes

• Downstream, recovery, and purification processes

• Robotics, manual processes to be automated

• Data analytics, incorporative

• Sustainability, reduce waste, energy, raw materials

Objectives for MSc thesis

• Curiosity - Generate ideas for process innovation

• Exploration - Access if the ideas can be incorporated into the manufacturing processes

• Experiments - Pilot-scale experiments/advanced computations performed in Helix Lab

University supervisors interested in developing collaborative MSc thesis project proposals with Novo Nordisk can meet us at the bi-yearly matchmaking event at Helix Lab, where our industry supervisors present our ideas for explorative projects. After the matchmaking, we map the interest of university supervisors via a survey and match NN supervisors with university supervisors. In addition, we are exploring new opportunities to develop additional collaboration with established collaborators. If you want to know more you are welcome to contact Kresten Jon Korup Kromphardt, Senior Scientific Consultant at Helix Lab.

Interested MSc students should contact their university supervisor or Kresten Jon Korup Kromphardt, Senior Scientific Consultant at Helix Lab.

Project ideas

Novo Nordisk only shares project ideas at the Helix Lab Matchmaking events.