Post Reflection- GSK

It was a fruitful trip to GSK on 20 Nov. Although it was just a short 3 hours plant tour around the entire plant, I am really impressed with the facilities and technologies they use, both in their lab and their production site. We are shown a video before the start of the talk. This video is to commemorate 40 years of GSK in Singapore. From the talk, I realised that there are multiple plants of GSK in Singapore and the plant that we are visiting is in-charge of pharmaceutical production.

We were then brought for a plant tour directly after the talk. We were split into 2 groups, where 1 group will visit the laboratory and the other group will go visit the production facilities first. I was in the group that visited the laboratory first. There are 2 different laboratories in GSK, technical development laboratory and quality laboratory. They develop the active products in drugs, in the sense that the chemicals within the drugs. We were shown around in technical development laboratory where we saw miniatures of how drug development works in sealed cabinets. We also saw how isolation works in their lab, with 1 glove up to $1000! This is a ridiculous price! There was also a question raised by Miss Lim on the quality of products during transportation. I realised that was a very important question to ask! Such active products will be consumed by the human population, and if there is any slight changes to the chemicals, it might have a disastrous effect on the human population! We then had a short talk with Dr Phillips, the chemist in technical development lab. He answered "BIG" questions by  Nicholas and Bram on how GSK separates enantiomeric drugs. 

We then moved down to the quality lab for short while before moving on to the visit around the production site. The production site is 4 storey-high, that is connected from the top to the bottom. This "factory" is for kilo-scale production of active products in drugs, with a whole series of process from mixing to drying. All revolves around physics and chemistry concepts! 

I have gained much interest in chemical engineering and I really feel that GSK has done much help to society. They developed drugs for the human population and it is a very noble job in GSK. I have considered doing chemical engineering in the future now, other than Life Science and Medicine in University. All these studies bind down to helping the society, so, why not?