March 2022 Featured Report

Navigating New Options for Commercial-Scale Biopharmaceutical Production

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Scalability remains a critically important topic for biopharmaceutical companies. For conventional protein products, the strategy once was straightforward: Drug makers would scale up, beginning with cultures in flasks and roller bottles to grow enough cells to inoculate laboratory-scale (often glass) bioreactors, then again to pilot- and commercial-scale, stainless-steel, stirred-tank bioreactors. At their highest volumes, such reactors can handle tens of thousands of liters of cells and growth media. If a drug developer did not have the requisite equipment to scale…

March 16, 2022

Boosting Yield and Preserving Quality: Increasing Production of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Cell Therapy and Regenerative Medicine Applications

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Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are promising starting materials for several clinical and industrial applications in cell therapy production, drug discovery, and in vitro screening. But as I learned from Maxime Feyeux (cofounder and chief science officer of TreeFrog Therapeutics in Bordeaux, France), such cells are a relatively new option in the toolbox of cell therapy developers. Advanced-therapy products can require controlled proliferation and differentiation of millions or even billions of iPSCs depending on the clinical indication, he pointed out,…

March 16, 2022

Reducing Downstream Scale-Up Needs: Advances Toward Continuous Downstream Processing

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The biopharmaceutical industry generally acknowledges that upstream and downstream aspects of drug-substance manufacturing are experiencing a capacity mismatch. Today, many recombinant proteins can be produced at expression titers of 3 g/L, with some yields exceeding 10 g/L. Such titers represent 100-fold increases in production capability compared with values from twenty years ago (1, 2). Increases in cell-culture density and improvements to perfusion-mode bioreactor systems hold promise for increasing yields further still. Such developments, combined with the broad availability of concentrated…

March 16, 2022

Scaling AAV Production: Easing the Transition from Laboratory Scales to Commercial Manufacturing

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Adenoassociated virus (AAV) has emerged as the leading vector for gene therapy delivery. Compared with options such as lentivirus and adenovirus, AAV exhibits a strong safety profile because it has low pathogenicity and requires a helper virus to replicate. AAV is also capable of long-term gene expression, and it can infect both dividing and nondividing cells (1–5). Developers of advanced therapies have found such advantages to be quite attractive. As of January 2021, two gene therapy products have gained US…

March 16, 2022