BioProcess International has followed, from the beginning, the ways in which single-use technologies have transformed the landscape of industrial bioprocessing. On 18 March 2009, we organized a panel session at the annual Interphex conference (Jacob Javitz Center, NYC) to drive discussion toward longer-term implications of single-use components and technologies on the future of bioprocessing. Is their use a cost-saving strategy overall? What economic factors are driving their adoption? The panelists were prepared to address such topics as economic considerations in…
Economics
Q&A with Dr. Florian Wurm
In early April, I chatted with the chair of ESACT, Florian Wurm, a professor of biotechnology in the faculty of life sciences of école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. As chairman of ESACT, what are your duties? How is the chairperson selected, and how long does he or she serve? How long have you been chair? The ESACT chair is elected from among the members of the executive committee, which are elected by the membership. The executive committee organizes…
A Few Small Steps for Biotech Will Yield Giant Leaps for Humankind
Biotechnology’s mission has never been more critical. In a call to action reminiscent of President Kennedy’s challenge to place a man on the moon in the 1960s, President Obama has challenged the scientific community to seek “a cure for cancer in our time.” The challenge is tremendous, but the place to look for such a momentous and meaningful achievement is among the great minds of scientists and inside the research laboratories of biotech companies. And that is but the tip…
Trends in Single-Use Bioproduction
Most people in the biopharmaceutical industry recognize, at least anecdotally, that the use of disposables in biomanufacturing is moving forward. At BioPlan Associates, we’ve tried to quantify how things are advancing and capture some of the shifts in attitudes, especially in light of current economic challenges. The major shift is that decisions are being made more from an operational point of view. It’s become less a question of if disposables will be implemented than of where and how.…
Molecular Medicine
In the 1980s biotechnology began to transform medicine with the introduction of recombinant hormone treatments and “magic-bullet†drugs based on monoclonal antibodies. In the 1990s, protein kinases offered a key to cancer treatment, and gene therapies promised to address many diseases at their most basic, genetic level. The 21st Century has brought us stem cells, RNA interference, biomarkers, and predictive medicine. None of these things has supplanted the others; instead, they merely expand on the basic idea…
The Business of Biotech
Calivin Coolidge, who served as president of the United States from 1923 to 1929, is often misquoted as saying “The business of America is business.†According to historians, however, what he really said was, “The chief business of the American people is business.†And he went on in the same speech to say, “Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence.†So the real Coolidge (as opposed to the caricature…
Pursuing Excellence
As new medicines, vaccines, biomaterials, and biofuels move through development, companies often face some of their toughest hurdles in moving from benchtop to production-scale processes. These are not only technological, but as technology advances it becomes more difficult to find experienced talent to make use of it. Some regional endeavors, such as the National Biomanufacturing Centre in the United Kingdom and the Massachusetts Biomanufacturing Center in the United States are pooling skills and resources to help companies…
The Vaccine Renaissance
The global vaccine industry has undergone a dramatic and well publicized rebirth. Near the end of the 20th century, it faced an uncertain future with increased pricing pressures and liability challenges for marketed vaccines. Many long-standing members of the industry chose to scale back their R&D efforts or abandon them altogether. Today, however, the landscape has changed. Because of a confluence of positive factors (advancements in science and technology, greater appreciation for the role of vaccines as antibiotic resistance increased,…
An Industry in Transition
As an industry, biopharmaceutical manufacturing is in transition and is facing challenges borne out of success. It was in the early 1980s that the first products were commercialized, namely the replacement hormones insulin and human growth hormone. The industry initially grew rapidly in the early ‘80s against a background of an immature supply industry: there were no large-scale columns (>10 cm diameter), column controllers, limited resin supplies and no established ultrafiltration technology. The position today is that the industry has…
Of Mice and Men…
Few US industries demonstrate preeminent creative and financial world leadership year in and year out, but we can think of two that look forward to continuing blockbusters that will provide mountains of new cash followed by consistent follow-on revenues. In both arenas, an idea is calculated to be something that people everywhere will want, so it is launched with a huge bolus of cash and a cash burn that almost takes its company to the brink. Both industries capitalize on…