January-February From the Editor February 2018

Happy New Year! This is our first combined January–February issue, but it should give you plenty of reading material to compensate for the absence of a January issue. There are some new approaches at work for us this year that bring new opportunities for both end-user and supplier authors, as well as offering us additional options for more timely publication of high-priority information.

As you look at our table of contents, the most obvious change is the change to sponsored “Supplier Side” articles. Because our audited, controlled-publication model imposes strict ratios of editorial to advertising pages, we’ve been able to publish only one such paper per issue (two at most). But these articles often are timed to coincide with an event or product launch. The editorial part of the process(es) for supplier-written papers has not changed very much, but allowing for sponsorship gives us pages for more of them. This introduces a more collaborative (editorial + marketing) process that can help you get the word out about your company’s solutions to myriad production, processing, and formulation challenges.

We editors are especially excited about bringing you more information in the form of full articles, eBooks, and inserts (Featured Reports) derived from conference presentations. You will see more content derived from presentations given at Biotech Week Boston in the fall, BPI West in San Francisco this March, and other KNect365 events that we’ve not covered as much in the past. We might arrange for permission to record a presentation and work with a transcript; we might interview a presenter after the fact to expand on his or her talk. Cheryl Scott’s featured report in this issue includes a technical overview from the Fill–Finish sessions at BWB Boston this past fall. Sarfaraz Niazi’s biosimilars eBook in January was submitted as a manuscript and prepared for him to share at KNect365’s FDA/CMS Summit in December — where he discussed his suggestions with regulators. The big-data eBook in January is based on Lisa Graham’s BWB presentation.

We’ll clarify these connections where they apply, and we hope that BPI magazine’s relationships with our KNect365 events helps to provides a broader audience for both authors and presenters. Our normal submission and review processes otherwise remain unchanged but enhanced by these new options. BPI plans to publish 33 eBooks this year — with a digital process that’s more streamlined than print publication allows. Find out all that is on our plates for 2018 online and see if you’d like to participate. If you’ve written for us before but not spoken at one of our events, let us know how we get you in touch with our conference colleagues. Or if you’ve presented but not written, then let me know how I can work with you to bring your work to the attention of our global biopharmaceutical/biotherapeutics audience.

The world is bringing challenges to our industry from all sides with changes in political, economic, social, scientific, environmental, and ethical institutions and interest groups. All of us who care deeply about the future of healthcare and access to innovative, life-saving therapeutics share a responsibility to keep industry needs at the forefront of related discussions. BPI editors and our event organizer colleagues together remain committed to conveying your insights to as broad — and influential — an audience as we can.