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…
June 2013 Supplement
Increasing Purity and Yield in Biosimilar Production
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…
In Vitro Functional Testing Methods for Monoclonal Antibody Biosimilars
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…
Concerns, Collaboration, and Capacity
The BPI Theater is a 50-seat venue that for seven years has been located at the heart of the BioProcess Zone on the exhibition floor of the BIO International Convention. There, BPI provides attendees with four days of live presentations focusing on the latest scientific advances and business trends in biotherapeutic development and manufacturing. On Monday afternoon, 22 April 2013, Patricia Seymour of BioProcess Technology Consultants (BPTC) moderated a roundtable discussion on biosimilar development in the BPI Theater at BIO…
Biosimilars, Oxidative Damage, and Unwanted Immunogenicity
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…
An Analysis of the US Biosimilars Development Pipeline and Likely Market Evolution
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…