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Magazine editors live in a strange warped time frame. We put the finishing touches on this very September issue in mid-August, having begun working with the materials a month before that. Meanwhile, we’re in talks with authors and companies who will be contributing to the pages of our October and November–December issues and inserts. Anne is working already to acquire manuscripts for the early issues of 2019. When it comes to eBooks, however, we actually put them together during the month that they come out — having cut the printing “middle man” out of the process. But we just finished working together with our publisher to determine what our entire eBook schedule will include next year.
You can imagine, then, that when I saw the movie Interstellar, it wasn’t all that difficult to for me to wrap my head around the relativity-induced time warps involved. This year, my husband and I are raising a new Labrador puppy, and I think our human instincts are a bit confused by how fast he’s growing. Babies shouldn’t go from toddling to ball-chasing athletes in just a few months! (“Remember when he was so little he couldn’t touch the floor from the couch?” “Yes, that was just back in March.” “Seems like forever!”) But my editorial instincts are honed to go with the flow, more or less.
You may be back from this year’s Biotech Week Boston and catching up on work as you read this. But I’m “speaking” to you from about a month in the past — with no knowledge of what might (have) happen(ed) in our world along the way. However, I can tell you what we have planned and scheduled to present you in the months to come — and that we’re looking forward to how it all turns out.
BPI’s eBook series hit the ground running in 2017 and has really picked up speed this year, more than doubling its number of editions while drawing ever more advertiser interest along the way. So we’re excited about the offerings planned for 2019. They fall into three general categories: process technologies, therapeutic modalities, and sponsored discussions. Technologies addressed will include characterization, viral safety, chromatography, benchtop bioreactors and scale-up, bioassays, automation, product stability testing, and new additions to the monoclonal antibody (MAb) platform. Therapies covered will include biosimilars, tissue engineering, vaccines, exosomes, nonplatform proteins, allogeneic and autologous cell therapies, and the risks and rewards of rushing to clinical testing with all the above. Finally, we’ll get suppliers of services and technologies together to discuss outsourcing business and strategies, fill and finish, training, consulting services, risk mitigation, process control, employee recruitment and retention, filtration, and expression systems. Clearly there’s a lot of room to move within each topic, and we invite your take on any of these subjects. BPI is a forum for sharing knowledge and concerns throughout the biopharmaceutical industry.
Of course you also could contribute to our regular-issue themes of upstream/production, downstream processing, drug-product manufacturing, single-use technologies, and so on. And we’ll be announcing our featured report topics for 2019 soon. But for now, let’s all do our best to live in the moment. It’s summer, after all! Or is it . . . ?