Business

Innovation Leadership in Drug Development

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A “sea change” in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries is leading established players to recruit a new type of drug-development leader. Disruptive innovators such as LG Chem Life Sciences, Google, and Nestlé are challenging established life-science companies to be nimbler, more creative, and more adept at applying new and emerging technologies. To spur creativity and entrepreneurship in research and development, smaller companies and Big Pharma corporations alike are recruiting leaders from different fields both inside and outside the life sciences.…

April 18, 2019

Competing for Talent: Make Your Biotech Workplace a Powerful Asset

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Talent is the lifeblood of pharmaceutical innovation. But there’s more to winning top talent than simply recognizing the value of our “human resources.” It also takes putting that value into action by giving people a workplace that inspires and even delights. Today, forward-looking industry leaders are seeing competitive advantage in rethinking workplace strategy and the role it plays in attracting and retaining talent, according to a 2018 report (1). Once considered to be merely a passive background for discovery, a…

April 12, 2019

Frameworks and Strategies for Commercialization Success in the Biopharmaceutical Ecosystem

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The “biopharmaceutical ecosystem” is a multibillion-dollar industry that encompasses large and small drug companies; ancillary providers of services, technologies, equipment, and infrastructure support; and tertiary groups that provide policy direction, regulatory standards, incubator space, and more. This ecosystem is vast and dynamic, evolving constantly as new ideas take hold to push the industry in new directions and present new opportunities for innovation and commercialization. However, many companies operating within this ecosystem struggle to understand their development and commercialization strategies, and…

March 14, 2019

China Can Be Ignored No Longer: Long-Term Biopharmaceutical Opportunities Based on Near-Term Demonstrated Growth

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China has long served as “the world’s factory,” but many experts in the biopharmaceutical industry have assumed that making consumer electronics, clothing, and toys for a global consumer base does not translate well to making complex biologics on the global stage. However, according to a newly released report, the biopharmaceutical market in China reached a value over US$9 billion in 2018, with the domestic monoclonal antibody (MAb) market there making up a very large percentage of that (1). Much of…

March 14, 2019

Partnerships in Immunotherapy for the Future of Cancer Treatment

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Immunotherapy seeks to harness the power of our human immune system to fight disease. In this rapidly evolving field, collaboration among different stakeholders is essential to bringing new treatments to market. Patient advocacy groups, researchers, hospitals, manufacturers, and government entities all are working together to translate promising new research into life-saving products. Types of immunotherapy include monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) and antibody derivatives, checkpoint inhibitors (immune-modulating proteins), cancer vaccines, T-cell therapies, and cytokines — so the approach involves a range of…

February 14, 2019

Trends in Real-World Study Design and Postmarketing Commitments in the EU and US: What We Can Learn from Big Data

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When a new medicine is approved, there is under a 25% chance that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will impose, as part of conditional approval, studies conducted to satisfy postmarketing requirements. US regulations governing such studies are found in the 2011 guidance document regarding “Postmarketing Studies and Clinical Trials — Implementation of Section 505(o)(3) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (1).” EMA regulations are found in the 2017 “Guideline…

January 30, 2019

Building a Bridge Across the “Valley of Death”: Strategies to Help Support Technology Development

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On Thursday 6 September 2018 at the annual BioProcess International Conference in Boston, the first “Technology Round Robin Featuring Six Innovative Bioprocess Technologies” was presented in an interactive session with attendees as active participants, asking questions and engaging in conversation with the six featured entrepreneurs. Detailed below, this session was a culmination of several steps in an overall strategy for some of the companies participating. To fully appreciate the launch of new technologies into the bioprocess arena, you first must…

December 14, 2018

Rolling with the ‘Tides: Elucidating the Role of Peptides and Oligonucleotides in the Biopharmaceutical Industry

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In earlier issues of BPI we published a few “Elucidation” closers that we called “Defining Moments.” Since then, we have tried to distinguish key confusable terms from one another. Those presented (and sometimes “elucidated”) have been analytical and bioanalytical, spectroscopy and spectrometry, and biosimilars and biobetters. They are just a few of the many confusable terms in the biopharmaceutical industry. For example, when someone says “drug delivery,” a formulator will think of a syringe or transdermal patch, but a logistics…

December 14, 2018

Partnerships in Immunotherapy: Working Together to Take Cancer Treatment to the Next Level

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Biopharmaceuticals are a particularly complex expression of medicine — and immunotherapies perhaps even more so. As treatments, these products themselves often also need “partners” of a kind: e.g., radiation/radiotherapies, traditional MAbs, and chemotherapies. Just as this field of endeavor requires the input and expertise of many different disciplines — from medical researchers to process engineers, clinicians to business leaders, and market experts to policy makers — this discussion of the topic of partnerships in immunotherapy brings together different experts in…

November 27, 2018

BioProcess International Conference and Exhibition 2018 Postevent Report: Key Insights, Highlights, and Take-Away Messages

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From the global shift in demographics to increased efficiencies in chromatography media, change is constant within the bioprocessing industry and a major reason delegates flock to the annual BPI Conference and Exhibition. As a place to get an overview of the hot topics affecting this industry, the meeting brings together key aspects of bioprocessing — therapeutic modalities, cells, expression systems, upstream production, downstream processing, development, and manufacturing — with digital integration and the increasing importance of analytics. Add in macrobusiness…

October 22, 2018