January-February 2023: From the Editor

The “happy new year” routines are pretty much over with by now, with their many variations on “shhh, don’t scare the new year away” and “2023 has got to be an improvement” among other expressions of “good riddance to 2022” and our collective anxiety over ongoing global crises. Meanwhile, as it has done since its inception, the biopharmaceutical industry continues adapting to survive and thrive as it celebrates considerable milestones. BPI devoted much of 2022 to retrospective analyses of progress during our 20 years in publication. And this new year may be, for us and many others, the one in which we can regroup, take stock of where we are, and collectively work toward accomplishing the next big things.

BPI associate editor Josh Abbott

Our November–December editorial offered farewell insights from our outgoing (now happily retired but unsurprisingly still busy) managing editor, Maribel Rios. In this issue, I am delighted to introduce you to our new associate editor: Josh Abbott joined our team in early November. Like the rest of our editorial team, he is based in Oregon’s Eugene–Springfield area. Josh earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, where he was a recipient of the Dow Jones News Fund internship in business journalism. He most recently worked as a reporter for Herald and News, a newspaper that covers Klamath and Lake counties in Oregon and Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California. He has specialized in environmentally focused feature writing and science communication, giving him knowledge of regulatory compliance issues, training, and safety concerns. I know that you will enjoy meeting Josh at events this year and telling him about your work and your hopes for the industry that we serve. In fact, as I write this, he is attending his first biotechnology event: Advanced Therapies Week in Miami, FL.

Meanwhile, this issue also launches our 2023 editorial calendar. As always, we editors and our marketing team attempt in the autumn of each year to predict the key topics to present in issues and featured reports throughout the following year. And I like to profile those topics in our January–February issue in the hope that you will want to contribute to BPI in the near future. You can find our revised author guidelines online at https://bioprocessintl.com/about/author-guidelines. Here are some highlights of BPI’s 2023 schedule.

Our issue themes continue to highlight the specific phases of biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing, which we define as production (cell culture and expression of biological drug substances), downstream processing (separation, purification, and impurity clearance to bulk drug substance), and product development (quality issues, testing, formulation and fill–finish in a drug-product focus). Some topics that we previously separated out as themes have become so “mainstream” as to preclude doing so. Single-use technologies, for example, are fully integrated into bioprocessing — and now have relevance to advanced medicinal products as well as to traditional biopharmaceuticals and biosimilars. An article on viral clearance might draw examples from work with monoclonal antibodies or a gene/cell therapy.

So the general “pillars of bioprocessing” are represented in six issues this year:

• January–February and September issues: upstream production
• March and October issues: downstream processing
• May and November–December: product development.

Special issue themes will be covered in April (cell, gene, and advanced therapies) and June (manufacturing capacity). And in July–August this year, we will launch Industry 360, a 360-degree view of the industry through the lens of the people who drive it and make it work. The approach will be similar to that of our well-received 20th-anniversary issue, featuring thoughtful, retrospective articles and impressions from across the life-sciences community, both gathered and commissioned by the editorial team and contributed by suppliers.

BPI’s featured report series for 2023 allows us to delve into topics of special interest from an editorial and peer-reviewed perspective. Rather than publish a “featured article” in every issue, we develop these small supplement inserts to focus on key issues through solicited and staff-developed articles. This year’s topics are vaccines (in this issue); formulation, fill and finish (March), cell-line development (April), facilities (May), purification/chromatography (June), BPI Theater presentations from the BIO International Convention (July–August), conjugates/ADCs (September), gene therapies (October), and expression systems (November–December).

Finally, our eBooks appear monthly, and we encourage you to consider submitting manuscripts for these electronic-only publications. Planned themes are cell therapies (January), monoclonal antibodies (February), automation and sensors (March), BPI Lab (April), bispecifics (May), continuous processing (June), mRNA/oligonucleotides (July), viral vectors (August), hybrid manufacturing (September), assay development (October), vaccines (November), and aseptic processing/controlled environments (December).

As BPI retires its 20th anniversary logo, we once again thank all you for continuing to support our editorial efforts by sharing your cutting-edge insights.