In today’s aggressive biopharmaceutical market, many drug discovery organizations, including both big pharmaceutical companies and small technology start-up companies, are outsourcing the development and manufacturing of their biopharmaceuticals to specialized contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs). Outsourced biopharmaceuticals range from those in early phase production to products that are well advanced down the development pipeline. As a result, there has been an expansion of CMOs that specialize in all aspects of biopharmaceutical manufacture, from process invention and development, through small-scale GMP production, to process validation and large-scale manufacture. The CMOs provide R&D services, quality function, and state-of-the-art good manufacturing practice (GMP) facilities needed for the production of biopharmaceutics. Using CMOs for biopharmaceutical process development and manufacture provides major cost savings by dispensing with the need to invest in experienced personnel and expensive manufacturing facilities…
Tag: <span>process development</span>
Total market share of biopharmaceuticals is estimated to increase from $33 billion now to more than $45 billion in 2007. These numbers are accounted for by the 64 products approved by European and US regulators and some of the 500 products currently under clinical evaluation. More than 2,000 products are in discovery and preclinical development. Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) and recombinant glycoproteins constitute a major part of these new biotech leads. The estimated demands for MAbs alone are more than 6,000 kg per year in 2006. Currently, 16 MAbs are licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pharmaceutical use and more than 130 are in clinical trials. This fast-growing class of biotherapeutics is expected to reach worldwide sales of more than $15 billion per year in 2008. In the coming years, mammalian cell culture technology will remain the production system of choice for MAbs and other recombinant glycoproteins. Therefore, efficient, cost-effective production systems need to be in place to meet the demands…
A growing number of separations’ scientists and process developers are looking beyond protein A sorbents for capture and initial purification of monoclonal antibodies. A variety of strategic and operational goals have prompted examination of alternative immunoglobulin-selective sorbents. Most broadly, many workers wish to eliminate design considerations associated with leached protein A. Also cited is a preference for sorbents that can withstand stringent cleanup using 1 M sodium hydroxide. In some applications, it is desirable to avoid the low-pH elution conditions typically employed with protein A sorbents — conditions that can foster aggregate formation. In still other cases, the target antibody may bind poorly to protein A. Finally, there may be interest in evaluation of immunoglobulin-selective sorbents less costly than protein A sorbents…
One of the biggest challenges in the production of recombinant therapeutic proteins, monoclonal antibodies, and vaccines is the clarification and separation of the product (typically a protein) from the cell culture or fermentation broth. The desired product is present in low concentrations and must be efficiently separated from the other components present in the bioreactor fluid. An overall objective in developing a clarification process is to achieve the highest level of product recovery (yield) and contaminant removal with the fewest number of unit processes. Understanding how each operational step affects the performance of the next step downstream is the challenge at hand. Centrifugation, in combination with depth filtration, is gaining acceptance as the preferred method for the removal of cells, cell debris, colloids, insoluble precipitants, aggregates, and other materials found in mammalian cell culture and bacterial fermentation fluids…
Process development is an investment. As with a personal retirement plan, the importance of making the investment is not in question, yet strategies for when, how much, and where to invest in process development vary significantly from company to company. For a personal retirement plan, the answers to these questions are straightforward: invest as early as you can and as much as you can, and take less risk the closer you get to retirement. This would also be sound advice for investing in process development (substituting “BLA filing” for “retirement”) were it not for two complicating factors. First, the majority of biotherapeutics that enter the clinic fail to make it to the market. This makes a large, early investment in process development less attractive. Second, there is extreme pressure to get into the clinic, and subsequently onto the market, as quickly as possible, minimizing the time available for process development…
With the advent of whole cell-based therapeutics has come a growing standardized quality control and quality assurance of the processes employed for developing and manufacturing cellular materials, similar to the controls over traditional drugs and biologicals. Cellular therapeutics present unique process and quality control challenges due to the innate complexities of living cells, making it important to use whole cell assays to provide detailed pictures of the status and consistency of cell preparations that will be used to treat patients. This article illustrates how a cellular assay from Guava Technologies addresses these issues…