October 2021: From the Editor

With autumn beginning to assert itself, our days here in Oregon are cooler, and long-awaited rain is coming. From drought and wildfires to tropical storms and flooding around the globe, we hope that you and your loved ones are making it through this year’s extreme weather events unscathed. And we continue to wish you well through the continuing healthcare crisis.

Autumn is time for the annual BPI Conference (including its parallel cell and gene therapy track), held as a hybrid event this year. We look forward to highlighting some presentations in upcoming reports and through submitted manuscripts. Meanwhile, we face the task of creating our upcoming media kit — and in it, our editorial calendar for 2022.

The calendar always requires us to balance industry knowledge with a certain level of prognostication and informed guesswork. Will today’s “hot topics†still be high priority by next summer or fall? Which aspects of familiar topics have we yet to focus on (and who will write about them for us)? A primary goal for BPI’s editors always is to push discussions into new directions that reflect the real work of the biopharmaceutical industry, highlighting changes whether they are subtle or overtly disruptive.
With work and travel continuity in flux over the past year and a half, we realize that authors need more time now than they have in the past to write and also negotiate permissions to do so. So here is an early look at BPI’s upcoming themes for 2022. Issue and featured-report submissions are due around three months before a publication month, whereas eBook content can arrive two months ahead of publication.

Here are our issue and featured-report (supplement) themes for 2022:

  • January–February: upstream/production (antibody derivatives report)
  • March: downstream processing (scale-up/-out strategy)
  • April: advanced therapies (process intensification)
  • May: manufacturing and product-development (cell-line development)
  • June: facilities (vaccines)
  • July–August: our 20th anniversary special issue
  • September: upstream production (process monitoring and control)
  • October: downstream processing (gene therapies)
  • November–December: manufacturing and product-development (viral safety).

We’re also planning eBooks for 2022 on antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs), sensors, assay development, monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), continuous processing, training and knowledge transfer, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), exosomes, cryopreservation, laboratory design, delivery devices, and mRNA.

If you would like to develop a manuscript for us, recommend a focus area/direction, or suggest an author, please contact me or BPI’s associate editor, Brian Gazaille. Perhaps writing for BPI in its 20th year of publication will fit into your plans for the coming months.