Since the mid-1970’s, when Kohler and Milstein first discovered the process by which myeloma cells and splenocytes could be fused to produce monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), a whole new world of important therapeutic, prophylactic and diagnostic products has opened up, bringing in huge benefits for patients and manufacturers. The total sales of therapeutic MAbs reached more than $13 billion in 2005. Sixteen of the 18 FDA-approved MAbs came to the market after 1997, and over 150 are currently in clinical development, suggesting their increasing medical importance and the remarkable, recent advancements in development technology…
Category: <span>Biologics Production</span>
A number of antibody drugs are currently in clinical development and 22 antibodies (including five diagnostic antibodies) have received FDA market approval in the last decade. A number of different technologies are now being used successfully to isolate potent therapeutic antibodies with minimal immunogenicity and improved safety. These include chimerisation (mouse/human antibodies), humanisation (complementarity-determining region [CDR] grafting), transgenic mice, phage display, ribosome display, and other emerging technologies. The phage and ribosome display technologies used at Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT) are based on the physical linkage of gene to gene product which enables the recovery and enrichment of genetic material encoding the selected antibody…
Polysorbate-80, or polysorbitan mono-oleate, a non-ionic surfactant commercially referred to as Tween-80, is commonly employed as an excipient in the biopharmaceutical industry due to its low toxicity as well as its ability to solubilize hydrophobic molecules. Thus, polysorbate-80 is employed as a stabilizer in order to control the formation of protein aggregates and larger particulates in biopharmaceutical drug substance and drug product formulations. Guidelines published by The International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) and the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) classify excipients such as polysorbate-80 as major components in biopharmaceutical formulations and specify that these types of compounds be quantified using a validated analytical method…
Optimal process development creates unit operations that effectively generate, separate, and concentrate a broad array of products. Historically, tangential flow filtration (TFF) process capabilities have been limited by technological and flow restrictions. Recent innovations in TFF module design have dramatically increased the capabilities of TFF to better achieve processing objectives. NCSRT has established a best practices protocol for developing clarification, fractionation, and concentration processes for mammalian, bacteria, yeast, insect, and virus based production systems. This article presents the development platform, supplemented with application-specific expertise…
The developing biotechnology community may offer solutions and hope for recent world events that have focused attention on the vulnerability of the world’s population. Concerns about new pandemics have been raised by the emergence of new influenza strains and the re-emergence of older and even more highly virulent strains. In addition, there are fears that bioterrorism could involve agents such as anthrax or smallpox, and these threats become even more of a concern when you consider the increased mobility of such organisms via today’s commercial aviation. The ability of the biomedical community to respond rapidly to these shifting threats is more important than ever…
One of the major aims of modern biotechnology companies that are producing recombinant therapeutic proteins is to focus on timeline reduction of critical cell line selection and process optimisation studies in order to minimise the time and financial constraints of early development products. This “minimalist paradigm” of maximising early development throughput with minimal capital/operational outlays is a key driver for implementation of novel analytical technologies which can be applied at-line to process instrumentation. The large-scale production of recombinant therapeutics in the biopharmaceutical industry relies on in-process monitoring of product titre. Traditional titre determination methods, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and protein A high performance liquid (immunoaffinity) chromatography (Protein A HPLC), are time consuming, and often reliant on analytical support from separate specialist teams/departments requiring detailed scientific knowledge and extensive training, with expensive capital outlay utilising large equipment…
For more than a decade, transgenic plants have been investigated as alternatives to microbial, mammalian cell, and transgenic animal systems for recombinant protein production. The main advantages of using plants as “bioreactors” are that the cost of upstream production (i.e. biomass creation) is low; plants do not carry viruses and other pathogens dangerous to humans such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), prions, hepatitis viruses and so on; and as eukaryotes, plants are capable of producing bioactive proteins. Numerous recombinant proteins have been expressed in various plant hosts, and some recombinant proteins are in various stages of clinical trials…
The outstanding success and safety record of first generation monoclonal products has created an immense increase in the number of product candidates that need to be evaluated clinically. The concept of platform purification has emerged in response to this need. A platform is a semigeneric, multistep purification procedure that can be applied to a wide range of monoclonal antibodies without extensive method-scouting and optimization. This approach can substantially accelerate process development and hasten inception of clinical trials…
As human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) continues to spread around the world, scientists are actively pursuing effective vaccines against the infectious disease that results in AIDS. A number of vaccine designs have been developed, including plasmid DNA constructs encoding HIV proteins. One advantage of DNA vaccination is that after the uptake of the plasmid by the host cells, the encoded antigens are expressed in the native conformation and allow authentic immunological processing of the antigen. Another advantage of DNA vaccines is that they can be repeatedly administered without vector-directed immunity limiting the efficacy of the boost. DNA vaccines alone can induce both humoral and cellular immune responses and provide modest protection against disease progression in the preclinical, nonhuman primate model when challenged with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)…
Poliovirus is a small (28-30 nm diameter) non-enveloped RNA virus belonging to the family Picornaviridae. The ability of poliovirus to cross the blood-brain barrier and its natural infectivity of central nervous system (CNS) tissue via the CD155 receptor, found exclusively in primates, has promoted the investigation of an attenuated poliovirus for the treatment of malignant gliomas. However, use of the virus in clinical testing is limited due to low yields obtained from conventional purification methodologies…