Singapore’s A*star wants to use micro-carrier tech to capture a share of the global stem cell manufacturing market. Demand for stem cells has increased markedly in recent years, creating a significant opportunity for those willing to innovate to help industry address its manufacturing challenges according to Steve Oh from A*star. “In a bid to do that, the Singapore government invested $80 million in three programmes to manufacture living cells as medicines,” Oh told delegates at the Cell and Gene Therapy…

rBIO plans to lower cost of insulin by 30% through the ‘hyper-expression’ of newly-developed strains of bacteria. The start-up company is launched out of San Francisco and arrives alongside the news that it has successfully synthetically produced human insulin, using E. coli bacteria as the host for recombinant DNA synthesis. According to rBIO, the next stages for the biotech are to upscale production of insulin and to identify other prescription drugs that can be manufactured using its approach. Already the…

Autologous cell therapy production is a challenge and control strategies developed for protein drugs may not work, says an expert. The biopharmaceutical industry has been making therapeutic proteins for forty years. The unit operations and methods are well established and effective. Firms know how to control production to ensure the finished medicine is of appropriate quality. Industry has less experience making therapies from cells harvested from patients and this is a problem according to Rachel Yost, senior process engineer at…

64x bio says a new cell screening technology has the potential to make viral vector production more efficient. The San Francisco-headquartered biotechnology’s “VectorSelect” platform is a high throughput screening technology designed to help viral manufacturers identify high yield production cell lines. 64x bio says the system’s key feature is “genetic barcoding,” which links information on viral vector productivity to the parent cell allowing users to screen millions of candidate production cell lines at once. The aim is to help firms…

Using yeast fermentation in a similar way to insulin synthesis provides a cheaper, more sustainable way to make cannabinoids like CBD, says Hyasynth. Last month, Canadian firm Hyasynth received a $2.5 milllion milestone payment for its commercialization achievements in being first-to-market with cannabidiol (CBD) produced and extracted from a biomanufacturing setup. “It’s a typical yeast fermentation, so the equipment involved would be similar to the production of insulin,” Kevin Chen, CEO of Hyasynth told this publication. “We grow the yeast…