Facility Design/Engineering

The Pandemic Changes Facility Strategy: A Focus on Speed to Market Triggers Innovation

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The push to expedite COVID-19 vaccines over the past year has led the biopharmaceutical industry to try novel strategies to accelerate product development and manufacturing. To compress discovery, development, and manufacturing into several months rather than a typical multiple-year effort has meant reexamining nearly every aspect of the process — including facilities required to house the work. Successful COVID-19 vaccine development undoubtedly will change biomanufacturing strategy forever. Previously, current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) manufacturing options were twofold: building facilities and…

May 21, 2021

The Difficulties of Manufacturing Cell and Gene Therapies At Scale

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From large-scale manufacturing of one-size-fits-all blockbusters to small-scale processing of personalized therapies, the biopharmaceutical industry has undergone a revolution over the past decade. Among the standout milestones is the development of advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs). More than 1,000 of these research-intensive therapies are progressing through clinical trials toward potential commercial manufacturing. Cell and gene therapies (autologous and allogeneic) are targeted for many incurable diseases and conditions, including autoimmune disorders and cancers. Despite the excitement about ATMP potential, developers and…

April 26, 2021

Reducing Risk in Bioproduction with Facilities Equivalency

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Providing consistency in cell culture media biomanufacturing is critical to supply continuity. Central to this is the development of redundancy and harmonization across a global manufacturing network. These unprecedented times have also highlighted the importance of strategizing for increased and unexpected demand. Read this Special Report to learn about the importance of equivalency and the strategies used to maintain this critical requirement at Gibco cell culture media manufacturing facilities. Fill out the form below to read the complete report and…

December 18, 2020

Case Study for a Facility-Fit Driven Process Development

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Time to clinic and time to market are the key drivers for client success in the biopharmaceutical industry. Facility fit is becoming key to understanding process constraints and which aspects of the process have the largest impact on enabling facility fit. Process development with facility-fit constraints in mind will ensure a smooth technology transfer and shorten the timeline of current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) product delivery to clients. Fill out the form below to read this Special Report and learn…

December 10, 2020

How Much Harm Can a Single Droplet Do? Considerations for a Viral Inactivation Step

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Viral clearance is a fundamental aspect of viral safety for biopharmaceutical products. Regulatory agencies around the world require biomanufacturers to segregate their operations appropriately to mitigate the risks of carryover contamination from previous process steps or product batches and of crossover contamination between product(s) made in the same facility. Guidelines are vague in defining “appropriate,†leaving biomanufacturers to interpret regulatory expectations and define their own virus reduction and segregation strategies. Given the differences among manufacturing processes and facilities housing such…

October 29, 2020

eBook: Trends in Facility Design — In-House Manufacturing Considerations for Cell and Gene Therapy Production

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Manufacturing and facility challenges facing cell and gene therapy companies are similar to but more complex than those encountered by companies that produce traditional biopharmaceuticals such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and other therapeutic proteins. A single product can have multiple components, manufacturing of which may or may not be outsourced. Project timelines are short, production technologies are new and evolving, and clinical demands change rapidly. Increasing competition for contract manufacturing services requires reserving capacity far in advance, which in most…

September 28, 2020

Designing the Right Strategy for Digital Transformation: How a Pragmatic Approach to Digital Transformation Can Help Biomanufacturers Adapt to a Challenging Future

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Although the biopharmaceutical industry has enjoyed explosive growth over the past three decades, it still faces an assortment of challenges. Those include growing portfolio complexities, increased demand volatility, stringent regulatory requirements, increased pricing pressures, and growing technological complexities, all leading to severe pressure on profit margins. To overcome such pressures, biopharmaceutical operations need to become more reliable and agile, and they must realize efficiency gains in both manufacturing and supply chains. Digital transformation offers strong value opportunities, including a potential…

May 28, 2020

Shared Clean-in-Place Systems: To Share or Not to Share?

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Risk of viral contamination is a an accepted part of developing biopharmaceutical products derived from mammalian-cell culture. Viral safety is achieved through a combination of complementary approaches such as selecting non–animal-derived raw materials, testing cell banks, testing for adventitious virus contamination during cultivation, and demonstrating viral reduction capacity of a purification process (1). The latter commonly is referred to as viral clearance by orthogonal purification. Clearly, viral clearance and appropriate viral segregation are important considerations in biopharmaceutical manufacturing process and…

April 13, 2020

Risk and Lifecycle Management for Biopharma Operations

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By working with the best biopharmaceutical companies for over a decade, 4Tune Engineering (4TE) has built a portfolio of services that enables companies to address current-century challenges. The biotechnology industry needs to address advanced therapies and personalized medicines and deliver explicit patient outcomes. Biologics today fall into four categories: monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), biosimilars, advanced therapeutic medicinal products (ATMPs), and cell and gene therapies (CGTs). Consequently, we can ask whether our manufacturing science and technology (MSAT) approaches are up to the…

December 16, 2019

Bioprocess Intensification – Fast, Flexible, and Efficient Solutions

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Propelled by single-use systems (SUSs), biopharmaceutical companies are approaching the ideal of continuous bioprocessing. In addition to improving process integrity and decreasing production costs, SUSs have enabled exciting ways to configure, operate, and evaluate manufacturing steps. Sensitive process analytical technologies (PATs) and discriminating data analysis platforms are supplementing those developments, helping process engineers and operators to study and modify workflows in unprecedented ways. The goal now is to intensify: to apply increasingly nuanced process knowledge and growing technological capability in…

November 21, 2019