Analytical

Modeling Flow Distribution in Large-Scale Chromatographic Columns with Computational Fluid Dynamics

Column chromatography remains a key unit operation in downstream processing of biopharmaceuticals. For most commercial processes, two to three chromatography steps are used to remove process-and product-related proteins, DNA and adventitious agents. As the biopharmaceutical industry has increased its product offerings and related demands, downstream processes have fast become a bottleneck (1, 2). Many commercial and clinical processes include a number of cycles on one or more chromatography steps to process the harvest from a single production batch. PRODUCT FOCUS:…

The Genesis of New Production Tools for Biotechnology Manufacturers

The biotechnology industry has from the start been characterized by its dependence on innovation. New therapeutics, new indications, new technologies — and the continual drive toward new approaches for optimizing processes — all contribute to getting novel products to the market (and to patients) efficiently and cost-effectively. Most of the technical literature reports on development processes for the therapeutic products themselves. But one element largely ignored forms an essential foundation to the work of the biotechnology industry: How are products…

Managing the Analytical Life-Cycle for Biotechnology Products

The analytical program for a given biotherapeutic has a life-cycle analogous to that of a manufacturing process used to prepare material for clinical and commercial use. This two-part article discusses analytical activities associated with the progression of biotherapeutic candidates from the early stages of clinical development through their appearance as licensed drugs on the market. In Part One, we examined the stages of the analytical life-cycle. Here we conclude by going into more detail on challenges associated with method qualification,…

“Combine All Files” Maps

Many proteins are regulated by posttranslational modifications (PTMs) such as deamidation, phosphorylation, and glycosylation. Documented effects of PTMs include changes in enzymatic activity, interactions with other proteins, subcellular localization, and targeted degradation (1, 2). Also these physicochemical modifications may also affect receptor binding (3) or higher order structure (4) and result in clinical effects such as changes to bioactivity, immunogenicity, and bioavailability (5). The development of analytical technologies to rapidly interrogate protein structure also has direct relevance to the biopharmaceutical…

The Next Generation of Biologicals and Their Production Systems

Combined advances in molecular biology, cell biology, and genomics have led to a wealth of new information about cellular processes. A growing understanding of the fundamentals of cell biology is now being translated into products that use an approach to exert a biological effect that is different from that of most biologicals currently on the market. To date, most biological products consist of highly purified proteins with a specific activity that alleviates or stops the symptoms of a certain condition.…

Cellular Therapy Success Through Integrated Automation

Cell therapies are being developed for a rapidly expanding range of indications. Genzyme Corporation has a treatment of cartilage in joints in long-term follow-up stage (Genzyme Corporation, www.genzyme.com). Cell Therapies are being investigated successfully in applications to treat infectious diseases such as AIDS, repair spinal cord injuries, strengthen immune systems, and treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. Positive results have been reported in treating arteriosclerosis and other cardiovascular diseases, congenital defects, breast reconstruction, and liver…

An Inoculum Expansion Process for Fragile Recombinant CHO Cell Lines

Development of robust inoculum expansion procedures from cell banks is crucial to successful upstream manufacturing processes. Typically, vial thaw and cell culture expansion processes follow well-established procedures. Certain recombinant cell lines, however, need extra attention and development efforts to optimize conditions for robust and reproducible vial thaw and further subculturing. Difficulties in thawing frozen cells might be clone specific or could originate from suboptimal conditions during freezing. Such conditions might not be known initially and could need further optimization at…

Multicolumn Chromatography

Downstream processing is a sequence of unit process operations that purify biopharmaceuticals and prepare them primarily for bulk formulation (Figure 1). Typically, a large volume (hundreds to thousands of liters containing kilograms of therapeutic protein) is delivered from an upstream fermentation or cell culture process — and this ends up as a small volume (a few liters) of purified concentrate product after processing. Figure 1: () For many years, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have been working to increase capacity, address upstream production…

Proactive Debottlenecking

It wasn’t so long ago that people in the biotherapeutics industry talked about a “capacity bottleneck” to describe the difficulty faced by bioprocessors as their many products moved forth through development to require production at larger and larger scales (1). Expression technologies at the time were making proteins at levels suggesting that huge amounts of manufacturing capacity would be needed soon. Just after the turn of the century, product titers (in terms of protein present per liter of culture broth/supernatant)…