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EHS Consulting Support for Biotech Growth

How Safety Partners’ Flexible EHS Model Helped a Biotech Company Keep Pace with Rapid Growth

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Life SciencesLife Sciences

Industry

Biotech/Pharma R&D

Location

United States

As biotechnology companies grow, safety and compliance must evolve just as quickly as the science does. For one rapidly expanding biotech organization, managing environmental, health, and safety (EHS) requirements became increasingly complex as research advanced, teams grew, and facilities changed.

Founded in 2007, the company began working with Safety Partners, a Trinity Consultants Life Sciences team, in 2009 to support its EHS needs. Over time, that relationship expanded alongside the organization itself, with Safety Partners providing consistent, adaptable support through their years of growth, transition, and organizational change.

Challenge

Like many fast-growing biotech companies, the client faced the challenge of balancing innovation with compliance and safety. In its early years, the company had no dedicated EHS staff and limited internal resources to manage safety, permits, training, and regulatory oversight. As scientific work expanded and became more intricate, safety and regulatory requirements also became more intricate and critical.

In addition to these challenges, the company experienced rapid hiring, multiple lab relocations, and facility buildouts across different states, each with its own regulatory landscape. Every move introduced new complications, from proper decommissioning and waste management to permit continuity and employee training. Eventually, the company’s acquisition by a global pharmaceutical organization added another layer of complexity, bringing heightened scrutiny, due diligence requirements, and the need to align local programs with global and corporate standards.

Solutions

Safety Partners assessed the company’s needs and deployed a highly flexible consulting model. The relationship began modestly in 2009, with just a few hours per month focused on compliance essentials. Support expanded fluidly over the years, from limited support to part-time coverage to a coordinated team of consultants and technicians who handled everything from day-to-day lab safety questions and inspections to incident response, exposure monitoring, and regulatory communication.

Because Safety Partners was embedded in daily operations, they understood the company’s research and could spot risks early, often before they became issues. As new research was introduced or changed, the Safety Partners team helped bolster the company’s safety program through regulatory compliance. As labs moved and expanded, Safety Partners guided the full lifecycle of each transition, managing the new research risks without slowing progress. This included planning and performing the decommissionings, managing the waste program, performing industrial hygiene sampling, and preparing documentation required by landlords and regulators.

When the company was acquired by a global pharmaceutical organization, Safety Partners’ institutional knowledge proved invaluable. The team supported due diligence by assembling years of safety documentation, helped maintain continuity during the transition, and served as a bridge between U.S. operations and global EHS leadership.

Services Performed

Safety Partners provided consistent and adaptable support through their adaptive EHS program support including safety training, documentation preparation, and maintaining lab continuity during site moves. The team was fully integrated with the client’s daily operations which provided insights into their research and best practices.

Results

Throughout the client’s engagement with Safety Partners, the approach has remained collaborative. Safety Partners worked with the client’s researchers and operations staff, not around them, designing solutions that match how people actually worked rather than forcing one-size-fits-all programs. The payoff of this long-term partnership was a safety program that matured in step with the science and company growth. The company navigated—and continues to navigate—the challenges of rapid hiring, multiple lab moves, and expanding its research complexity without sacrificing safety or compliance. Over time, researchers became more engaged with Safety Partners, raising questions earlier and viewing safety as a resource rather than an obstacle.

Perhaps most telling, the strength and maturity of the safety program stood up to acquisition scrutiny and provided a solid foundation for integration into a global pharmaceutical organization. Rather than building or deploying an internal team to replace it, the organization chose to rely on Safety Partners as an extension of their own EHS function.

Today, even with a formal global EHS structure in place, Safety Partners continues to serve as the day-to-day EHS team for the acquired sites while also providing supplemental staffing and subject matter expertise across additional U.S. locations.