Manufacturing

Biophysical Analysis: A Paradigm Shift in the Characterization of Protein-Based Biological Products

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Generating a stable environment for a biopharmaceutical drug substance is a critical step for ensuring a long drug-product shelf life (1–6). This process begins early in development with preformulation screening. Some of the most critical parameters to maintaining potency and activity are protein conformation (tertiary or three-dimensional (3-D) structure), folding (secondary structure), and proper subunit association (quaternary structure). Collectively, those are known as higher-order structure (HOS) and can be highly influenced by the formulation environment of a protein drug product.…

September 23, 2015

Variables in “Passive†Cryopreservative Methods: Standardizing Cell-Based Assays By Reducing Cryopreservation-Induced Variability

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Cells have become essential in modern medicine as therapies, vehicles for producing high‑value therapeutics, and tools for high‑throughput screening of pharmaceutical compounds. In the latter area, more than 50% of drug discovery screens use cell‑based assays, predominantly targeting receptors and ion channels using fluorescence‑based measurements, in either or both high‑ throughput and high‑content formats (1). Alongside a cell therapy market estimated to be worth some $5.0 billion by 2015 (2), the larger cell‑ based screening market is estimated to be…

September 23, 2015

Development of a High-Throughput Formulation Screening Platform for Monoclonal Antibodies

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The goal of formulation development for therapeutic proteins is to find conditions under which a protein remains stable during storage, transport, and delivery to patients. Both chemical and physical stability must be considered. Chemical stability is related to the rates of chemical modification to a protein molecule such as deamidation of aspargine residues and oxidation of methionine residues (1, 2). Particularly important to control if they affect biological function, those modifications could also lead to changes in conformation or half-life…

September 23, 2015

Enabling Cell Therapy Manufacturing

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As this special Pall supplement of BioProcess International issue goes to press, progress continues in the field of cell therapy research. The revival of cell (and gene) therapy has been driven by some positive achievements that have occurred over the past decade. Cell therapy products differ in many ways from traditional small-molecular and biologic products. The main difference is that, contrary to traditional biopharmaceutical applications in which cells secrete the product of interest, in cell therapy applications cells are the…

September 16, 2015

Positioning for Success: An Interview with Mario Philips

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On 12 March 2015, BPI met with Mario Philips, president, single-use technologies, at Pall’s Port Washington, NY, facility, to learn about Pall’s reasons for entering the cell therapy market. Also participating in the discussion was Alain Fairbank, director of marketing for cell therapies at Pall Life Sciences. Read the full text of this article in the PDF (Login required).

September 16, 2015

Meeting Lot-Size Challenges of Manufacturing Adherent Cells for Therapy

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Adherent cells such as adult primary cell lines and human multipotent (MSCs) and pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) present a manufacturing challenge as lot sizes increase from 109 (billions) to 1012 (trillions) cells (1). Typically, manufacturing platforms are good for one log of expansion. So new methods will be required to achieve commercially relevant lot sizes. Traditional two-dimensional culture methods have been used to grow anchorage-dependent cell types. Although such methods are reliable and well defined, they are very labor intensive…

September 16, 2015

T-Cell Suspension Culture in a 24-Well Microbioreactor: High-Throughput Screening of Operating Conditions

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Cell therapy promises revolutionary new therapeutic treatments for cancer and other serious diseases and injuries. For example, T-cell therapy response rates of >50% and durable complete response rates of 20% have been reported in patients with metastatic melanoma who had failed other therapies (1). In another example, sustained remissions of up to a year were achieved among a small group of advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients upon treatment with autologous T-cells expressing an anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (2). Numerous other…

September 16, 2015

Scaling Up Stem Cells: Moving from Laboratory to Commercial Production with a Single-Use Multiplate Bioreactor

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Cell-based products are becoming increasingly important as potential biotherapies. Cell therapy is predicted to have a huge impact on the healthcare sector over the coming decades. Stem cells, in particular, are investigated as potential treatments for a diverse range of applications (such as heart disease and metabolic and inflammatory disorders) in which they might be used to restore lost biological functions. Read the full text of this article in the PDF (Login required).

September 16, 2015

Expansion and Characterization of Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Pall SoloHill® Microcarriers

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Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are self-renewing cells that differentiate into several terminally differentiated cell types. These cells have been isolated from multiple sources such as bone marrow, adipose tissue, peripheral blood, and other adult tissues(1–6). The interest in these cells is that they hold the potential to cure disease and are being pursued in clinical trials. Three emerging fields of interest for stem cells are cell therapy, regenerative medicine and screening of candidate drugs. In many cases, poor correlation between…

September 16, 2015

Strategies for Microcarrier Culture Optimization

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The process of delivering an allogeneic stem-cell therapy to patients requires isolation and expansion of rare tissue-specific stem cells, which are subsequently delivered to individual patients for treatment. One type of cell used for such therapies is commonly known as human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs). They have been isolated from a number of tissues: e.g., bone marrow, heart, brain, placenta, and umbilical cord. And they have been shown to be immune-privileged in that hMSCs elicit no graft-versus-host (GvH) response such…

September 16, 2015