Cytiva’s five-year manufacturing growth strategy includes expanding facilities and 24/7 shift patterns to support continued double-digit biopharma growth and a COVID-19 tailwind In April, Danaher Corporation completed its $21 billion acquisition of General Electric’s (GE’s) Healthcare Life Sciences business and five months later the division – renamed Cytiva – has laid out an aggressive growth strategy to deal with demand for its bioprocess equipment and services. “Cytiva is deploying a multi-pronged approach to expand our global manufacturing capacity,” Emmanuel Ligner,…

MilliporeSigma will run a recently expanded facility in Jaffray, New Hampshire on a 24-hour cycle due to increased demand for filtration devices and membranes, driven in part by COVID-19. In June 2019, MilliporeSigma – the bioprocessing business unit of Germany’s Merck KGaA – announced plans to expand its site in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The site produces a variety of filtration devices and membranes that support the life science industries and the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals. The 35,800 additional square feet of…

Producing recombinant proteins in fly larvae instead of single-cell technologies could reduce biomanufacturing costs by up to 90%, says bioprocess startup firm Proteinea. Proteinea, a US and Egyptian startup, is looking to change the economics of biomanufacturing. The firm challenging the standard of using stainless-steel or single-use bioreactor systems to produce biologics by instead leveraging its insect-based biotechnology platform. Rather than produce a recombinant protein in single bacteria, yeast or mammalian cells, the firm uses InsectaPro, its platform comprising of…

Biopharma needs to embrace new downstream processing technologies to overcome its manufacturing issues, according to an expert. Industry is reluctant to adopt new downstream technologies because firms prefers systems with which staff are familiar, said Alois Jungbauer from the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences. He began by asking delegates at the BPI Europe virtual conference in July: “Why is chromatography so popular? “It’s the high selectivity. It’s the high resolution. We…

Automation can eliminate downstream bottlenecks and help pharma cut costs says the team behind a continuous downstream processing system at the UK Centre for Process Innovation. Manufacturing biopharmaceutical is a complex, time consuming and costly process. Most products are produced in batches – production runs through a series of steps and then ends. Batch production is reliable and able to make consistent product. However, it can be slow and expensive according to Stuart Jamieson, head of research at the CPI,…

Computational analysis and gene editing will yield CHO cells able to make protein drugs, faster and more cheaply says expert. The ability to turn cells into protein production “factories” is the foundation of modern biopharma according to Bjørn Voldborg, director of CHO cell line development at the Technical University of Denmark. “If you want to engineer a factory [cell line] you need to understand what machines you have in the factory. It’s the genome sequences of the CHO cells –…