Kudos once again to our IBC colleagues for another excellent BioProcess International Conference and Exposition. Throughout the week of 31 October– 4 November more than 1,400 attendees and 125 exhibitors engaged in lively discussions on critical issues affecting our industry. The Long Beach, CA, convention center proved to be a comfortable and accessible venue for multiple session tracks, technical workshops, and seminars. Among the trends and topics that made frequent appearances in presentations were the ongoing challenges in developing chemically defined media, the expanding use of disposables into complete (or nearly complete) manufacturing processes, and the increasing interest in continuous processing.

My editorial staff and I appreciate chances to meet one-on-one with our authors, advisors, and advertisers. And we had quite a lot to talk about with everyone! As BPI (the magazine) heads into its tenth volume in 2012, we are planning a number of special activities to celebrate our decade of publishing — more about those (including a new BPI mobile app) in the January issue!

A regular feature of the BPI conferences is our Best Poster award program. At each event, members of the magazine’s editorial advisory board select two winning posters: one from a vendor and one from a user company. This represents a large commitment on the part of those judges, and I cannot thank them enough for their excellent work. The judges this year were Fred Mann (Merck-Millipore), Bill Whitford (Thermo Fisher Scientific), and Adriana Manzi (Atheln).

Each poster is evaluated based on the timeliness of the technology presented, its relevance to current industry needs, and its technical reproducibility and/or commercial availability. Winning presentations are those that help move the industry closer toward realizing current goals — in this case, toward “faster, safer, cheaper” manufacturing. The layout/format of each poster and the quality of its data and rhetoric are important factors, though not the sole criteria for the final decisions.

This year, the best poster award for a supplier company went to William Miller of Flownamics and his coauthors for “Improving Cell Culture Productivity with a SEG-FLOW™ Automated Online Sampling and Feed System.” The judges deemed that this technology will drive improvements in cell-culture production. The winning poster from a user company was by Marcella Yu of Genzyme (a Sanofi company) and her coauthors for “Continuous Monoclonal Antibody Production and Purification Using High Density Perfusion Cell Culture and Protein A Periodic Counter-Current Chromatography.” The judges felt that this work significantly helps define future approaches to continuous processing. I congratulate the winners once again and thank them for their work to further the success of our industry.