During the lifecycle of a biopharmaceutical, occasions arise in which the facility and support organization responsible for ensuring that it is manufactured according to schedule, demand, and quality specifications must change, either in whole or in part. The reasons for this vary: some related to scale, some related to clinical development phase, some related to internal manufacturing capacity and program ownership. The industry has adopted the term technology transfer to describe these events. Many such situations have been…
Economics
30th Anniversary of Smallpox Eradication
May 2010 marked the 30th anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration that the world had won freedom from smallpox. An intensive two-year search had discovered no evidence of the disease since the last case on 26 October 1977. It was a historic moment — no disease had ever before been eradicated. Smallpox had terrorized humans for more than 3,500 years and in the 20th century alone had been responsible for 300 million deaths. The success of the…
Influence of Process Development Decisions on Manufacturing Costs
As we have discussed, cost has not always featured highly during bioprocess development, in which traditionally the focus was on product quality, regulatory compliance, and speed to generate material for the clinic (1). As the industry matures in commercializing successful products, increasing competition (both from competing products and biosimilars) leads to issues of cost and manufacturability coming to the fore. Solutions adopted will depend on each organization: At one extreme are small biotech companies developing novel therapeutic proteins;…
Geographic Strategies in Biomanufacturing
In BPI’s June issue, we presented a supplement on geographical trends in biomanufacturing. We looked at the influence of a growing demand for biotherapeutics in emerging countries and the influence of new technologies that are driving interest in smaller, perhaps more geographically distributed production. We wanted to explore what a global bioeconomy would look like and where its primary capacity would be concentrated. Authors provided examples of how to balance cost with control issues. They talked about working in different…
How Geography Affects the Cost of Biomanufacturing
As the biopharmaceutical industry undergoes restructuring, its focus shifts to the efficiency of drug development and overall costs of delivering affordable medicines. A question often raised concerns the manufacture of drug substances overseas to tap into a cheaper manufacturing base (1). There are many issues to consider when looking at overseas locations, such as intellectual property (IP), the availability of skilled labor, and the emergence of new markets. The situation is more complex with biopharmaceuticals because the products…
Minimizing Costs and Process Times with Local Biomanufacturing
For a growing number of biopharmaceutical companies, the world is getting smaller. They are operating in smaller, more flexible facilities; servicing potentially smaller markets; and managing local products. Local manufacturers are looking for ways of doing standard processing less expensively without making changes that carry regulatory risk. Most of these facilities are vaccine manufacturing sites. The upsurge in localized diseases and need for global pandemic preparedness (especially under uncertain capacities) have countries such as Malaysia, India, China, and Brazil pushing…
How Project Management Fits into the Drug Development Continuum
Once upon a time, this was the way of things: Most projects happened in-house, or at least locally, and the activities they required weren’t very complicated. In today’s global business environment, however, the days of such simplicity are gone. Instead, now the “+1” person in the N + 1 equation (see the box at right) is the glue that holds complex, global activities together for a company. That person is the project manager. Simply stated, project management (PM)…
Flexible Manufacturing
Flexibility has quickly become one of the most noticeable buzzwords of the bioprocessing industry. Understanding what constitutes a “flexible” process ranges from the simple application of one specific type of technology (e.g., single-use systems, automation, standard controls) to a somewhat extreme concept of a “throw-away” process. But whatever the definition, the factors leading to the need for more flexible approaches to biomanufacture are clear: Rapid, sometimes unexpected, changes in a company’s business situation and/or product portfolio (whether for patients or…
Making a Positive Urban Impact
The nonprofit Center of Research Technology and Entrepreneurial Exchange (CORTEX) was formed to facilitate development of two redevelopment areas in St. Louis, MO. Last month, I explained their vision and introduced the participants, along with highlighting an example development on the campus of St. Louis University. This month, I conclude with several more examples. Center For Emerging Technologies The Center for Emerging Technologies in St. Louis is ranked a top-10 business incubation facilities in the United States. In under nine…
Managing the Product Pipeline
In 2007, the biopharmaceutical market represented ~$71 billion: 10% of the entire pharmaceutical market. Therapeutic proteins and monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) account for 98% of all biotherapeutics in development, the rest being blood proteins and enzymes — all the products of recombinant DNA technology. Before the recession hit full on, growth of this market was estimated by some at ~15%. (Now it’s hard to predict at all.) Making biotech drugs consumes huge amounts of time and money, but they…