January-February 2018

Extend the Life of Your Facility: Flexibility Allows for Biopharmaceutical Process Innovation

For an industry built on constant change, there’s a surprising disconnect between the continuous drive for innovation and the inflexible facilities that house biopharmaceutical operations. Some of today’s facilities are built for today’s use with little thought about tomorrow’s. The typical approach for a new process or drug coming to market is to start with a brand-new building and permanently embedded equipment designed around that specific process. That approach is expensive and unsustainable. New bioproduction facilities can cost US$500 million…

High-Throughput Technologies: Accelerating Process Development

One of the key elements of any biopharmaceutical drug development project is the timeline from identification of the appropriate DNA sequence to investigational new drug (IND) application filing and the start of clinical trials. Typically, this timeline ranges from 18 to 20 months, depending on the type of molecule being developed and the extent and requirements of the chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) packages supporting the nonclinical and clinical parts of a development program. There is constant pressure to shorten…