eBooks

eBook: Rare Diseases — Biopharmaceutical Challenges Presented By Relatively Small Patient Populations

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By definition, an orphan disease affects a small percentage of the population. However, with some 7,000 such conditions identified so far, they collectively have a significant impact on global health. An estimated 350 million people are affected worldwide by a rare disease — altogether more than the population of the world’s third largest country (the United States). Some well-known biopharmaceutical companies are devoted to developing treatments for rare diseases. However, the vast majority of such diseases have no treatments approved by…

October 12, 2021

eBook: CAR-T Cell Therapy — Mitigating Clinical and Bioprocess Limitations

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Developers of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies are working in a state of tempered optimism. As of September 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved only five such products, two coming this year. Now that those approved products have demonstrated the viability of CAR-based immunotherapies, drug developers are trying to address significant limitations that have come to light with increases in available clinical data and bioprocess knowledge. One shortcoming concerns therapeutic efficacy. Blood cancer patients who have…

September 30, 2021

eBook: Bispecific Antibodies — Their Development and Manufacture As Therapeutics

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Generating antibodies with two or more specificities is one of the most innovative fields in therapeutic antibody development, with tremendous potential for use in creating new treatments for patients with unmet medical needs. In particular, bispecific antibody development is stimulating innovations in bioprocessing techniques from expression through upstream processing and candidate purification. Wherever possible, process-development scientists and engineers are borrowing techniques that were honed for mature monoclonal antibody (MAb) platforms, then applying those to bispecific antibody manufacturing. Nevertheless, the unique…

September 28, 2021

eBook: Product Variants in Bioprocesses

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Product variants are contaminants because they bear properties that are different from those of desired biological products with respect to activity, efficacy, and safety. Thus, such variants can compromise product quality and consistency. In this eBook, Yuval Shimoni explores different types of variants — including primary-sequence variants, undesirable posttranslational modifications, aggregates, and degraded proteins — and explains how their presence can diminish the performance and quality of drug substances and products. He also discusses how product variants form at different…

August 30, 2021

eBook: Cell and Gene Therapies —
A 2021 Industry Update

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that as of June 2021, 22 advanced therapy products have received regulatory approval in the United States. The first such product gained regulatory approval in 2010. Since then, hundreds of cell and gene therapies have advanced to clinical evaluation, but few products have reached commercial stages — and those that have done so have been hindered by manufacturing problems. In this eBook, writers from the BioProcess Insider and Project Farma analyze trends…

August 25, 2021

eBook: Process-Related Impurities — Emerging Strategies for Detection, Identification, and Management of Host-Cell Proteins

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Host-cell proteins (HCPs) represent a major class of process-related impurities (PRIs) that are generated during biopharmaceutical manufacture. Although the vast majority of such proteins are removed from a drug substance during downstream purification, residual HCPs can remain in a finished drug product. Even in minimal concentrations, copurifying HCPs can pose safety risks and compromise protein-product yield, efficacy, and stability. Thus, regulatory agencies consider the presence of HCPs to be a critical quality attribute (CQA). Sufficient clearance of these impurities helps…

July 28, 2021

eBook: ADCs — Evolving Links in the Biopharmaceutical Pipeline

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Antibody–drug conjugate (ADC) developers both old and new are talking about the next generation of drug candidates coming through their pipelines. In April 2021, Zynlonta (loncastuximab tesirine, from ADC Therapeutics) became the eleventh such product to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But with dozens of ADC candidates currently in clinical trials, those 11 products represent the tip of the ADC iceberg. In this eBook, Dan Stanton (founding editor of BioProcess Insider) explores ADC production history,…

May 24, 2021

eBook: Chromatography Resins — Addressing Challenges in Biologic Purification Workflows

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Although chromatography remains the backbone of downstream workflows, selecting appropriate technologies to optimize processes can be challenging. Numerous resin options are available, and the fact that most biologics are large, complex, and inherently unstable further complicates development of a robust workflow. Because chromatography processes can alter a biologic in ways that could impair its intended therapeutic function, investment in process development is critical. Techniques such as design of experiments (DoE) can be used to identify the best approach during process…

May 18, 2021

eBook: Bioreactor Sensors —
Inside the Dynamics of Cell Culture

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Cell culture monitoring can fall into something like a “black box” conundrum. Efforts to measure key parameters such as pH, glucose, and even cell density require sampling and removal of the contents from a bioreactor. But that procedure can expose both a process and an operator to contamination risks. Emerging bioreactor sensors are designed to address some of those challenges, but the rapid adoption of single-use technologies and the rise of perfusion cell culture have presented obstacles to their implementation.…

April 30, 2021

eBook: mRNA — Revisiting a Technology That Has Rocketed into Success

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At the end of 2018, BPI published its first eBook about mRNA drug products — and quite a lot has happened since then! Our initial report highlighted companies working on mRNA therapeutics for cystic fibrosis, heart disease, and cancer, as well as vaccines. The latter approach took off in 2020 with the advent of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and in a stunningly short time, the biopharmaceutical industry has learned much about manufacture, formulation, product design, and distribution of mRNA…

April 28, 2021