Business

Spotting, Tracking, and Predicting Inspection Trends

    Compliant companies, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all alike. Every noncompliant company seems to find its own way to fall short of compliance with good manufacturing practice (GMP) and come, as did the writer’s famous heroine Anna Karenina, to grief. One commonality of compliant firms is that most seem to have excellent self-auditing/self-inspection programs. Indeed, many inspectors say that a primary predictor of a compliant company is a rigorous self-inspection program. Such a program is appropriately focused, adequately resourced,…

A Decade of Production

Single-use technology has arguably been the biggest “story” of the past 10 years in bioprocessing. And for many people, implementation of disposable elements began soon after the turn of the century with a bioreactor (1, 2), first developed by Wave Biotech in 1996, now a mainstay of many upstream process development laboratories and sold by GE Healthcare. BPI identified the significance of such technologies early on, making them the subject of a supplement in its second year. By the fourth…

A Proactive Discussion of Synthetic Biology

    Experts in synthetic biology research, law, ethics, and social science from more than a dozen institutions gathered at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, on 8–9 November 2010 to discuss “Societal Issues Arising from Synthetic Biology: What Lies Ahead.†The workshop was organized by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. After plenary presentations on the first day, almost 70 participants broke into groups to discuss potential…

A Decade of Change

Allen Roses, former worldwide vice president for genetics research and pharmacogenetics at GlaxoSmithKline, raised eyebrows in 2003 when the newspaper The Independent quoted him as saying that the vast majority of drugs — more than 90% — work in only 30 or 50% of the people. “I wouldn’t say that most drugs don’t work,” he said. “I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 percent of people.” Though the newspaper characterized this as an “open secret within…

A Decade of Biomanufacturing

    The biopharmaceutical industry is emerging from four years of economic challenge in a very healthy state. Process improvements over the past decade have played a major role in keeping the industry healthy. Earlier this decade, most companies were more concerned about quickly getting their drug products to market than about strategically controlling costs of operations. But according to my group’s recent study, this has changed in most areas of manufacturing. In fact, although this year companies reported overall…

A Decade of Product Development

    In 2004, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) transferred regulation of many highly purified, “well-characterized†biopharmaceutical proteins from the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) to the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), which until then had primarily regulated only synthetic, small-molecule drugs and chemical substances. The most novel/complex and the less-characterized biologics remained within CBER’s jurisdiction. This change complicated BPI’s mission somewhat. When the magazine was founded, we responded to questions from advertisers…

A Decade of Outsourcing

    Outsourcing has been such an integral part of the bioprocessing industry that BPI made it the focus of its first supplement (September 2003). Since then, manufacturers continue to reach beyond local and national borders to extend their networks of partnerships to emerging markets. Global economics during the past decade have not always made outsourcing easy. Ten years ago, manufacturers faced tough decisions over whether it was more cost effective to outsource or keep process activities in-house (possibly expand…

Expansion of the Prior-User Rights Defense

A common reaction to some patents directed to manufacturing processes (especially of biotherapeutics) is “How did they get a patent for that when we’ve been doing the same thing for years?” But the number of patents covering biotherapeutic production processes is steadily increasing along with the realization that upstream and downstream processing events provide a potentially abundant source of so-called “second-generation” patent protection for biologics, especially those facing biosimilar competition. Although some groups are prolific patent filers claiming a wide…

Fight Cancer with Nanotechnology

    Imagine a diagnostic test that sifts through millions of molecules in one drop of a patient’s blood to detect the tell-tale protein signature of a cancer subtype. Envision a drug “ferry†that doesn’t release its cytotoxic contents until it slips inside cancer cells — or a molecule or small panel of proteins that can reveal within days whether a cancer treatment is working. Bioprocess Applications of Nanoparticles ()   Researchers have created nanosized particles and devices that are…

Biopharmaceutical and Medical Device Compliance

Off-label marketing occurs when doctors prescribe a drug or device for a use that has not received FDA approval (1). Physicians have the unfettered right to prescribe the best drugs or devices for their patients, including approved drugs and devices for unapproved uses. Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, however, cannot promote their products for such uses — even if those are supported in medical literature. Companies cross the line when their sales representatives sell physicians on the idea of using…