Land of Pharma - 2

I need to fill out the description of WMC's products here before I can get into much else:
Hemopres is the marriage, basically, of an API and some excipients (an excipient is a material found in the finished drug product that is not the API). The total weight of a single Hemopres tablet is about 200 milligrams. But we said above that the prescription is for a 5 mg tablet each day. The number of milligrams on the label doesn't mean the weight of the entire tablet – it means the amount of API in the tablet. A 5 mg tablet would be so small that it would probably get lost on the trip from the bottle to your mouth, so it's bulked up with a lot of sugar or some other completely inert substance. Then there are some other things added, like binding agents to hold the whole thing together. This mixture is put into a press where it is all smashed together under huge forces, then it's coated to keep from turning to dust when it's in the bottle with 499 other tablets.
Menengvax is three milliliters of liquid. It's in a sealed bottle that has to be kept refrigerated. In that three milliliters are purified virus particles. In this case, a virus particle is a protein specific to this meningitis virus that has been removed from the virus. So there is nothing infective in this vaccine – you need the full virus (and it's nucleic acids) to get sick. But you'd need a ton of virus particles to get the immune memory you need to be safe from that disease for the rest of your life. So, also in those three mL of liquid is the adjuvant, which hightens the body's response. There are a handful of other things, like stabilizers, and the rest is purified water, which allows for the material to be injected.
With the differences in these two medicines, it's certainly clear that there must be differences in the overall manufacturing process. Sure, we already spoke about tablet compression and filling of fluid into bottles, but that's obvious. Next, we'll explore the buildings where these products are made.