Many of the biopharmaceutical industry’s most influential minds gathered on Wednesday for the executive summit during BioProcess International 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts. During the day-long meeting, a group of experts from diverse corners of the industry joined a panel to discuss how organizations can collaborate to best develop and implement new technology for biomanufacturing.   

Moderator Derek Adams, CEO of Stellular Bio, kicked off the discussion. He said, “I’ve seen quite a variety of processes that certainly could use new technologies to improve them by making them better, faster, and cheaper.” He then asked the panelists, “How important do you see the challenge of bringing new technology into biopharmaceutical manufacturing?” 

Kelvin Lee, institute director at the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) said identifying problems within the entire industry is difficult because every company faces different obstacles. “What are some important technologies or innovations that are necessary to address and help the larger ecosystem move forward? That’s particularly challenging,” he said. “I haven’t found a Google search term I can use or a Wikipedia page that says, ‘Here are the 25 best things to work on.’”  

He said his organization meets with individual companies on a regular basis and continuously reads about new technologies while collaborating with industry professionals. “Trying to synthesize that to find the real opportunities is a lot of work.” 

Nyberg said an important key to implementing new technologies is to first fully understand how it works and how it can help. “The challenge with new technologies is understanding the business case or the use case. What is this technology going to solve?” He said before implementing new technology it’s important for companies to understand the scope of the problem to see if adoption is even worthwhile. 

Susan Roberts, department head of chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) added an academic perspective to the conversation. She said the faculty members at WPI who are doing impactful research. “The challenge is really to get those faculty to think about how to translate new technology and to engage them with industry in a strategic, appropriate way,” Roberts said. 

Brooke Luck, interdisciplinary scientist with the Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Preparedness Consortium (BioMaP-Consortium) responded, stating that her organization hosts collaboration events that enable stakeholders from across the industry to discuss and tackle challenges together. The BioMap-Consortium works in support of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and has members from all corners of the industry.  

Luck added her organization performs market research to learn about new problems the industry is facing. BioMaP also hosts events, such as its industry engagement event that will take place in October.  

Lee used the technology and platforms surrounding monoclonal antibody (mAb) as an example of a modality that has undergone numerous innovations while facing and overcoming a number of different hurdles. He said the industry gained a broader understanding of mAbs as people migrating throughout the industry, taking different jobs and using different platforms, thus strengthening the industrywide understanding of the modality and the common problems companies have with it.

Now similar difficulties are facing newer modalities. “When it comes to the technologies themselves, one of the things we’ve been working on at NIIMBL having some shared frameworks, knowledge, and understanding.”   

“You need to be in a community and talk about this collectively,” Nyberg added.