Innovation has long been a topic of focus in the pharmaceutical industry, with developers striving for it, regulators and payers demanding it, and everyone — from patients to manufacturers — worrying about who is going to pay for it. Something that often gets lost in the conversation is: What exactly do we mean when we talk about “innovation”?
In the first of this two-part article, Sandoz's Cindy Cao shares lessons learned from working with the FDA and reveals that there is still a lot of room for exploration and innovation in biosimilar development.
I recently attended the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) Biosimilars Council’s Leading on Biosimilars conference.In addition to the many tidbits of knowledge I took away from this event, two terms kept resurfacing throughout the conference I feel are worth delving into more deeply.
Newly-appointed Pfenex CEO, Eef Schimmelpennink, faces the challenge of determining how to adapt Pfenex to a constantly changing future. Though it's still very early in his tenure, Schimmelpennink highlights some areas he will keep in mind as he steers Pfenex's future biosimilars onto the market.
In a presentation at the 2017 World Biosimilars Congress, Asif Mahmood, disease area safety and strategy lead at Pfizer, shed some light on global risk management strategies and the challenges of launching these programs.
In a recent article, I discussed the market opportunities and reimbursement system in Russia. But in addition to this snapshot of the market, my conversation with BIOCAD's Roman Ivanov highlighted how the Russian biosimilar regulatory system was established, as well as the challenges BIOCAD has faced during it evolution.
Innovation has long been a topic of focus in the pharmaceutical industry, with developers striving for it, regulators and payers demanding it, and everyone — from patients to manufacturers — worrying about who is going to pay for it. Something that often gets lost in the conversation is: What exactly do we mean when we talk about “innovation”?
If you are charged with any of the tasks that lead to a successful product launch in the pharmaceutical industry, you know how critical it is to execute a multitude of steps successfully. Among these are agreement by marketing on the look and design of the campaign, completion of clinical trials, project management, testing of active pharmaceutical ingredients, the completion of a trial production batch, receipt of all materials at the production site, production scheduling, regulatory agency submissions, trademark registration, and a host of others.
Investing in training for employees in the life sciences and biopharmaceuticals industries generates quantifiable returns that go far beyond simply imparting specific, task-oriented knowledge. For example, effective and thoughtfully planned onboarding and sustainable training are key elements in attaining a culture of quality throughout the organization. Furthermore, inadequate training contributes to process and product variability.
Microbial control for non-sterile manufacturing helps to ensure the safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals. Products that are compromised with excessive amounts of microorganisms, specified microorganisms, or objectionable microorganisms may not be effective or could be dangerous to consumers. Unfortunately, the regulations governing non-sterile manufacturing are not as clear or as abundant as those for sterile manufacturing. This leads many manufacturers to utilize risk assessment analysis tools to adapt portions of sterile manufacturing guidelines when developing environmental monitoring programs for non-sterile environments.
As concerns about the cost of medicines reach a fever pitch, innovators are looking to leverage a promising advancement to help address the fundamental need for sustainable healthcare in the U.S. — biosimilars.
By William Whitford, Strategic Solutions Leader, BioProcess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences
The industry is abuzz with talk about continuous biomanufacturing (CB), and its virtues have been well described. Here we will look at some of the barriers or concerns perceived to limit its value to the industry. Justified or not, quite a few concerns have been expressed regarding the implementation of this new, rather disruptive technology.
The use of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) and MAb conjugates as biopharmaceuticals have increased over the last decade. As a result, more cost-effective, efficient, and flexible process purification solutions are of high priority for MAb manufacturers. Increasing product titers upstream can introduce challenges in downstream purification processes. With increased MAb titers, the cell culture supernatant might contain an elevated number of impurities (e.g., aggregates) that need to be separated from the target molecule.
Biologic drugs have great promise, but they are complex and, as a result, are very expensive to manufacture and subject to technical pitfalls.
The paper-based lab versus the digital lab. The largest barrier to innovation for any lab is performing tasks manually and recording experiment data in paper lab notebooks. Easy-to-use digital applications can increase productivity while reducing wasted time and inefficiencies associated with searching for relevant experiment data.
Can high density cryopreservation allow biopharma manufacturers to buy back time? The answer is “yes” – and specialized media (both catalogue and customized) for perfusion processes are being designed for this purpose.
Protein purification at the lab scale bridges the gap between small-scale exploratory protein purification and high-throughput operations, such as industrial- scale manufacturing. At the larger end of the scale, advances in upstream processing such as improved fermentation capacities have led to increased amounts of crude sample available for input. Despite this meaning higher potential yields of target proteins, it also poses an enormous challenge for timely and cost effective sample processing further downstream. This challenge is made even more difficult as scale increases due to higher amounts of impurities — a result of prolonged fermentation times and higher cell densities in large-scale cell cultures.
Manufacturers safeguard biologic materials during the development process through a set of measures commonly referred to as the “Safety Tripod.”
