Alcami at the Cortex Innovation Community

Alcami Corporation is a leading provider of comprehensive pharmaceutical development manufacturing services for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. With recent increased customer demand and the growing trend of analytical testing outsourcing within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, Alcami was in need of a larger space for their analytical testing facility. For these reasons, they relocated from their existing space in St. Louis, Missouri to the Cortex Innovation Center campus adjacent to the historic Central West End neighborhood.

KAI was selected to provide MEP design services to fit-out the second and third floors of this building. The second floor consisted of approximately 19,000 SF of office and support space for the laboratory located one floor above. The third floor, also approximately 19,000 SF, housed laboratory, additional support, and clean room spaces.

The main laboratory spaces included several fume hoods that were exhausted utilizing a Strobic fan located on the roof of the building as a 100% outdoor air unit was able to provide the necessary ventilation/makeup air to the spaces. Phoenix valves were used to maintain pressure relationships in the lab spaces and a dedicated perchloric acid fan was utilized in the MEP design to collect fumes from the perchloric acid hood in the Chemistry Lab.

The clean room area was served by a dedicated rooftop unit to maintain room temperatures and pressure relationships between the spaces. A deionized water loop was designed to supply purified water to the lab spaces and medical gases utilized in the laboratory were routed from the gas cylinder storage building to the interior lab spaced. Finally, an access control system was provided to limit access to specific areas of the lab and an emergency generator was included in the design for short term operations in the event of a power outage until the power supply returned to normal.