Video news: Pall strategic deals aim to enable biosimilar and novel scale-up

Pall Corporation has inked separate partnerships with cell line and expression tech firms Celltheon and Aetos Biologics. The deals help enable both novel and biosimilar manufacturing, the firm says.

At the 2018 BPI Conference in Boston, Massachusetts earlier this month, Pall Corporation announced it had entered into a strategic partnership with cell line and expression technology platform development company Celltheon Corporation.

The deal combines Pall’s bioprocessing equipment and consumables with Celltheon’s SMART Expression Platform to offer customers integrated systems to develop novel biologics.

“The idea is that a customer can go to Celltheon, have their process developed at very high yields, and when it’s time to go to the clinic they can then scale up using our scalable technologies, both in the upstream and downstream,” Matt Niloff, director of sales at Pall Biotech Integrated Solutions, told BioProcess Insider at the show.

“So it’s a true single source type of arrangement where it derisks the process for development all the way through scale-up.”

Biosimilar cell line deal

Pall has also inked a strategic deal to integrate its bioprocessing tech with Aetos Biologics’ biosimilar cell line platform.

Matt Niloff, Director of Sales at Pall Biotech Integrated Solutions, speaking at BPI East in Boston

Like Celltheon, this partnership is based on the business model of the partner, Niloff told this publication off camera. “In this case, Aetos Biologics focuses on working with biosimilar manufacturers to refine and scale their processes, as well as to ensure that tech transfer is efficient and reliable.”

Both the partnerships are separate as Celltheon’s business is novel molecule cell line development while Aetos’s business is biosimilar molecule cell line development.

Strategic partnerships

“All of our partnerships are enabling only,” Niloff said. “This is not a joint development agreement, as Pall does not distribute exclusively, or produce or sell drug products to the market.”

When asked, he said this type of collaboration is not a new direction for Pall but rather part of the firm’s efforts to streamline its own business models.

“Our goal is to enable all types of drug manufacturers by continuously improving bioprocesses with exceptional technologies and consumables. Strategic partnerships such as this (and others) are meant to highlight the versatility of our technologies to enable both novel and biosimilar manufacturing.”