TOYOPEARL GigaCap Q-650S is capable of delivering oligonucleotides of comparable purity and slightly higher process yields under the same operating conditions to those seen with resins requiring higher operating pressures. This capability allows chromatographers to purify oligonucleotides without the added expense of purchasing high pressure manufacturing equipment.
The biomanufacturing industry is heavily invested in improvements in productivity and efficiency, and innovation is a critical component to ensuring gains in these areas. Yet that is not always the case. Suppliers and innovators in this market face greater challenges, and much longer product evaluation cycles than in other segments, for example the information technology or semiconductor industries. In the highly regulated biomanufacturing environment, changing any aspect of a process can potentially necessitate additional regulatory submissions to the US Food…
The biosimilars space offers significant commercial opportunity. About US$60 billion of branded biologic sales will lose patent protection over the next few years, including some of the largest-selling monoclonal antibodies (MAbs). Companies are jostling among themselves, each seeking the best position to exploit that opportunity. Regulators are creating and refining the necessary pathways to success, alliances are being forged, and companies are being acquired. Despite the significant opportunity for biosimilar MAbs, significant risks remain. Perhaps the most significant of those…
No consensus concerning biosimilar-related terminology and definitions has yet been achieved (1,2,3). Biosimilars may be defined as biopharmaceuticals slated for generic-drug–like, abbreviated, comparisons-based approvals through a formal biosimilar approval pathway in the United States, European Union, and/or other highly regulated and developed countries based on a demonstration of substantial (bio)similarity to a reference product. As required in the United States, biosimilar active agents (those involving recombinant proteins) must be identical in primary sequence with their reference products. Analytical and comparative…
The California Separation Science Society (CASSS) held a Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls (CMC) Strategy Forum on drug products for biological medicines in July 2012 in Bethesda, MD. Topics included novel delivery devices, challenging formulations, and combination products. This CMC Strategy Forum aimed to promote an understanding of how best to increase the speed and effectiveness of drug product and device development for both large and small companies. Participants focused on areas that improve the likelihood for regulatory success, reduce risk,…
The pressure to contain rising healthcare costs — combined with the number of innovator biologic drugs coming off patent (30 licensed biological drugs by 2015) — offers huge opportunities for developers of biosimilar products. In 2011, the global market size of the biosimilars industry was around US$2.5 billion. Global demand for such products — and monoclonal antibody (MAb) biosimilars, specifically — is estimated to grow at 8–17% from 2012 to 2016 (1). The advent of biosimilars should bring more affordable…
Comparability has become a routine exercise throughout the life cycle of biotechnological products. According to ICH Q5E, a comparability exercise should provide analytical evidence that a product has highly similar quality attributes before and after manufacturing process changes, with no adverse impact on safety or efficacy, including immunogenicity (1). Any doubt about data from such studies could translate into unforeseen pharmacological or nonclinical studies — or worse, clinical studies. Selection of analytical methods and acceptance criteria that will be applied…
Concerns about the economic viability of biosimilars center on their high development cost relative to small-molecule generics, along with (and partly because of) the difficulty in demonstrating bioequivalence for these complex molecules. Immunogenicity is a particular area of increasing vigilance at both the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) (1, 2). Unwanted immunogenicity is an underlying cause of multiple deleterious effects for all protein-based therapeutics — including loss of efficacy, altered pharmacokinetics, and reduced…
In 2012, the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) published a complementary set of three guidance documents on the development, analysis, and validation of biological assays (1,2,3). USP chapter recommends a novel, systematic approach for bioassay validation using design of experiments (DoE) that incorporates robustness of critical parameters (2). Use of DoE to establish robustness has been reported (4,–5), but to our knowledge its use in qualification or validation protocols for assessing assay accuracy, precision, and linearity is not described in literature.…
Current downstream processing strategies for recombinant proteins often require multiple chromatographic steps, which may lead to poor overall yields. Product purification can be especially difficult when a target protein displays reduced stability, forms isoforms or misprocessed variants, or needs to be purified from a complex mixture containing a high degree of contaminants. One technology that has been developed to tackle such limitations is based on custom-made chromatography matrices containing camelid-based single-domain antibody fragments. With a molecular weight of only 12–15…