Presented by Sean Kevlahan (chief executive officer, Quad Technologies) 11:00–11:20 am Kevlahan described Quad Technologies as an early stage company founded in 2013 and headquartered in Woburn, MA. Its approach to cell and gene therapies is offering bioprocessing tools with a biomaterials focus. The company’s QuikGel platform is a hydrogel-based technology for making different sizes of hydrogel microbeads that will dissolve under gentle conditions. The beads can be magnetic or nonmagnetic for both research and bioprocessing applications. This technology provides Quad…

Presented by Yan Zhi (program design technical lead, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies) 11:20–11:40 am Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies Texas (FDBT) has two dedicated viral products facilities: The National Center for Therapeutic Manufacturing (NCTM) building was designed for process development and early phase clinical good manufacturing practice (GMP) production of advanced therapeutics including viral, microbial, and plasmid products. The newly built Flexible Biomanufacturing Facility (FBF) is designed for clinical and commercial GMP production of viral products. The NCTM boasts 14 first- and second-generation mobile…

Presented by Stewart McNaull (senior vice president of business development, KBI Biopharma) 11:40 am–12:00 pm Founded in 2004, KBI Biopharma operates a core facility in Durham, NC. In 2013, the company needed more space and set up laboratories in Research Triangle Park, NC. Using mammalian cell lines, it has developed both monoclonal antibody (MAb) and non-MAb platforms. It acquired a former Merck site in Boulder, CO, in 2014 and retained staff experts in fermentation expression, refolding, and mass spectrometry. With manufacturing…

Presented by Cyril Peter (senior proposal manager, Lonza Pharma and Biotech) 1:00–1:20 pm A publicly traded company, Lonza focuses on drug sponsors that want to go to market with their own products. “To get there, you need to make a drug out of your molecule, manufacture it, go through clinical trials, and generate data for submission to regulatory authorities for market authorization.” That requires information about the molecule (critical quality attributes, CQAs) and on how you make it (critical process parameters,…

Presented by Adam Elhofy (chief science officer, Bio-Ess Laboratories) 2:00–2:20 pm “What we call biomanufacturing,” said Elhofy, “is all about cells. When cells get cranked up, they start to have deficiencies — and those deficiencies lead to different protein quality, to aggregates, and to a loss of consistency in protein quality. So how do you improve productivity and protein quality?” Bio-Ess Laboratories (formerly Essential Pharmaceuticals) has a technology to address the role that lipids play in cell productivity. The company has…