Adapting and securing the production of essential medicines

With over 250 production sites and 100,000 jobs, the French pharmaceutical industry is a strategic sector undergoing a major transformation.

Boosted by growing global demand and sales estimated at over 70 billion euros, it faces a major challenge: boosting production capacity while securing access to medicines.

The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated this dynamic, placing health sovereignty at the heart of priorities, with initiatives to relocate essential medicines within the country.

At the heart of this transformation, process equipment - tanks, fermenters, cleaning systems - play a decisive role: they condition product conformity and the ability to produce on a large scale.

PIERRE GUERIN, an Equans France entity, supports these challenges by mastering the entire value chain, from design to maintenance.

More than an equipment manufacturer, the company acts as a long-term industrial partner, serving an essential objective: guaranteeing the availability of safe medicines for patients.

Photo de l'usine de LFB à Arras

Key figures

x3

LFB's bioproduction capacity thanks to the Arras plant

600

jobs envisaged at the Arras site

30+

distribution countries for LFB's fifteen or so drugs

Producing plasma-derived drugs for patients in France: a direct health sovereignty issue

Philippe Pierre, Managing Director, PIERRE GUERIN
“ The health crisis has once again highlighted the strategic importance of the pharmaceutical industry. By producing its automated process lines and stainless steel tanks in France at its Niort site, PIERRE GUERIN is fully in line with this dynamic and actively contributing to the European sovereignty of the pharmaceutical industry. ”
Philippe Pierre Managing Director, PIERRE GUERIN

Tripling the production of biomedicines: LFB's structuring project in Arras

The LFB is a French biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and markets plasma-derived medicinal products to treat patients with serious and rare diseases in three therapeutic areas: immunology, hemostasis and intensive care. It is the sole fractionator of plasma collected by the EFS in France.

In 2018, LFB is launching the construction of a new-generation plant near Arras - one of the largest European sites dedicated to the production of plasma-derived medicinal products built in recent years. The aim: to triple bioproduction capacity for three of its drugs, with the creation of more than 600 jobs.

PIERRE GUERIN is chosen as industrial partner from 2018, as part of a relationship of trust built on more than 17 years of collaboration with LFB, on the group's other French industrial sites.

For Arras, PIERRE GUERIN carried out:

  • A hundred or so process tanks and their associated skids
  • A dozen or so CIP cleaning-in-place stations and their associated skids
  • Supply and integration of equipment for 3 plasma-derived drug production units (albumin, immunoglobulins and fibrinogen)
  • Design, manufacture, automation, installation and commissioning: an entirely turnkey service

The Arras plant, which went into operation at the end of 2024 and the first batches of drugs marketed in 2025, is now the flagship of the LFB Group, to strengthen its activities in France but also internationally.