October 2019: From the Editor

One of our annual tasks as a publication staff is to develop next year’s editorial calendar. How well are we anticipating new directions in research, development, and manufacturing? Are we including interesting and forward-thinking topics — or relying too heavily on frequent, overintroduced themes? We have seen an overall generational change in conference attendance and our reading audience. So we also ask ourselves whether we are correctly assessing information needs and providing accessible levels of detail.

It’s not a perfect system and often feels like fortune telling. Big themes are about the same as ever and generally concern process and product development. Special themes have for a few years now included single-use technologies, regenerative medicine, and methods of intensifying and integrating processes to reduce operating footprints and time to market. So we look for nuances, specific applications that can serve as case studies, and new voices (new authors and fresh insights).

Because our editorial needs are fairly expansive these days, I am sharing these topics with you in the hope that you might want to write for us in the coming months. Below are next year’s themes and general submission dates for end-user/academic manuscripts (not including our ebook series). For more information, please contact one of the BPI editors.

Upstream and Production: For our January–February and September issues, submit manuscripts by mid-October (now) and early June, respectively.

Downstream Processing: For March and October issues, submit manuscripts by 1 December and 1 July, respectively.

Product Development and Manufacturing: For our April and November–December issues, submit manuscripts by 1 January and 1 August, respectively.

Cell and Gene Therapy: For our May issue’s special theme, submit manuscripts by 1 February.

Single-Use Processing: For our June issue’s special theme, submit manuscripts by 1 March.

Our featured report series for 2020 will explore themes of CAR T-cell therapies (January–February), integrated/continuous processing (March), intelligent manufacturing (May), speed to IND (June), cell line development (September), MAb developments (October), and gene therapy (November–December). These focused inserts operate on slightly different submission and editing schedules, so contact us soon if you’d like to reserve your place.

The biopharmaceutical industry is alive with innovation, creativity, and continuing dedication to saving lives and improving the quality of life worldwide. We look forward to continuing to work with you to share information that will help the industry achieve its goals.

S. Anne Montgomery Editor in Chief