Special Reports

The Impact of Protein Stability on Virus Filtration

Filtration of protein-based biologics is essential for minimizing viral contamination and ensuring product safety and high quality. The tendency of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) and recombinant proteins to aggregate under a number of conditions can complicate selection of a virus filter. An increasing demand for high concentration formulations creates additional challenges. When performing filterability studies and to ensure meaningful virus filter evaluations, downstream process scientists must address factors that can lead to aggregation. This special report on virus filtration by…

Increasing the Integrity of Closed Systems: Advantages Offered by Single-Use Connectors

Due to the complexity of biologic development and manufacturing and the business pressures of the biopharmaceutical industry’s landscape, the margin for error in today’s industry is small. That is why minimizing the threat of contamination is critical when using a closed system for drug development and manufacturing. Yet the traditional method of connecting each step in a closed process can present other risks to the integrity of your product. Therefore, it is important for you to be confident in selecting…

Bench to Bedside: Why Successful Drug Development Requires a Team Approach

The process from drug development to market approval takes many years and requires both integration and orchestration of several activities based on deep scientific and commercial expertise. We tend to think of drug development as a sequential, phase-driven process during which a product is taken methodically from discovery through preclinical studies, clinical development, and ultimately commercial launch. In reality, development of new drugs is not linear; rather, it requires integrated coordination between collaborators from different functions and stakeholders — from…

Facilitating Workforce Development: A case study on improving single-use training through vendor and end-user collaboration

Discover how Pall Corporation and Lonza collaborated to improve single-use technology training for operators using a blended approach to learning. This article presents: The importance of SUT training for operators. Why a blended approach ensures that operators get the training they need in the format that best suits their learning style. How collaboration between suppliers and biomanufacturers can shorten training program development timelines and increase the quality of training tools. How Pall and Lonza developed a digital training approach together.…

AAV Downstream Process and Product Characterization: Integrating Advanced Purification and Analytical Tools into the Workflow

The optimization of the downstream process for Adeno-associated virus (AAV) production with consistent quality depends on the ability to characterize critical quality attributes affecting potency, purity and safety of the final product. As the gene therapy field continues to push products through the clinical pipeline, an increasing need for efficient purification and analytical tools has become evident. In addition, the regulatory space has expanded in parallel to the use of AAV, driving the demand for simple and efficient assays to…

Chromatography in mRNA Production Workflow

Rapid response to global pandemics requires the manufacture of billions of vaccine doses within months. This short timeline must allow for design and testing of active ingredients, development of production and purification processes, clinical evaluations, regulatory filings, and manufacturing. Existing purification methods often have been adopted from laboratory-scale techniques to allow rapid implementation, and those have provided adequate product quality. But future mRNA development will require optimized production and purification processes. Chromatography has been a workhorse of biomanufacturing for decades,…

Purity By Design

Astrea Bioseparations has a well-established modular program to support customer projects from small to large scales with ligands, adsorbents, and chromatography columns that design purity into each process. Demand for increased productivity in biopharmaceutical manufacturing has placed new pressure on downstream purification operations. For recombinant proteins and monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), such pressure stems from significant gains in upstream productivity, particularly from high titers produced using increasingly efficient cell-culture systems. For viral vectors used in gene and gene-modified cell therapies and…

Tris, a Critical Raw Material: Improving the Quality and Consistency of Supply

ANGUS Life Sciences is the world’s largest supplier of tromethamine buffers and the only manufacturer of the tris molecule based in the Western hemisphere. The company sells directly to biopharmaceutical customers and contract manufacturing organizations as well as to reprocessors who repackage the chemical or process it into different grades and derivatives. After recent expansions in both the United States and Germany, the company now boasts dual-source manufacturing capabilities for its highest-purity tris products and is confident about its ability…

Rethinking Chromatography

Dynamic trends in the biotherapeutic industry are shifting manufacturers towards new modalities and intensified production strategies. This development is supported by ongoing scientific and technical advances in both upstream and downstream processing steps. Downstream processing of new modalities requires chromatography technologies that can handle large, fragile molecules (such as mRNA and viral particles). To maximize speed and productivity, platforms supporting continuous processing will become essential. In this feature, Sartorius discusses current and future concerns for process chromatography operations. They then…

Get High-Throughput, Definitive Identification of Viable Cells and More in Your Cell Therapy

Analyzing for viable cells using traditional methods such as flow cytometry often encounters clogging resulting in the loss of precious cell therapy samples. Not only is it low throughput, but incredibly complicated, which can lead researchers to misidentify cellular and non-cellular material and confuse cell viability results with product-purity issues. Additionally, it is a regulatory requirement for all injectable drug products be characterized for sub visible particles (SVP) and aggregates that may form during a manufacturing process. With Backgrounded Membrane…