DOWNSTREAM PROCESSING WHITE PAPERS & CASE STUDIES

• Avoiding Drug Shortages With Microbial Detection

  Over the past year, critical drug shortages used to treat a host of life-threatening illnesses have been making headlines. Microbial contamination has been cited as a major contributor to the shortage, yet the prevailing practices to ensure the safety of drugs have been slow to change. In most cases, quality assurance practices safeguarding the drug making environment continue to rely on periodic air and a culturing method from a prior century. By Aric Meares, President and CEO, BioVigilant

• Rapid Chemically-Defined Feed Media Development to Improve Simulated Cell Culture Processes

  Implementing an optimized feed medium may be the most effective alternative for modifications to the growth medium in an existing process.

• Rapid Screening Of A Cell-Based Assay For GLP-1 Receptor Using A Natural Product Library

  Here we demonstrate the detection of GLP-1R binding through the incorporation of a homogeneous cell-based binding assay using HTRF Tag-lite® technology. By Brad Larson and Peter Banks, BioTek Instruments, Inc. and Nicolas Pierre, Suzanne Graham, Jean-Luc Tardieu, and François Degorce, Cisbio US, Inc.

• Continuous Harvesting Of Extra-Cellular Proteins From Mammalian Cell Cultures Utilizing Small-Scale Perfusion

  The use of a small-scale cell culture system not only maximizes the production of valuable protein but also avoids the high capital cost associated with system scale-up. Continuous harvesting can provide significant improvements in protein yields when compared to those of typical batch operations.

• The Challenge of Measuring Total Organic Carbon In Modern Pharmaceutical Water Systems

  Total Organic Carbon (TOC) is one of the quality attributes defined in the European and USA pharmacopoeias for pharmaceutical waters. Modern water treatment systems can deliver such high purity water that TOC levels can be consistently close to zero and very difficult to measure with any accuracy. This paper discusses some of the challenges when using TOC analysers to demonstrate pharmacopoeial TOC level compliance for modern water systems in the light of the ICH Q2 document from the International Conference on Harmonisation.

• Guidelines For Proper Filtration And Delivery Of Samples To On-Line Process Analyzers

  Increasingly precise process control strategies, often linked to computer control, have accelerated the use of sophisticated on-line chemical composition analyzers in plant applications. Instruments such as gas and liquid chromatographs, ion chromatographs, laser optic instruments, atomic absorption instruments and specific ion analyzers, which were rarities in laboratories ten years ago, are now found routinely in plant settings. By Ken Perrotta, Division Engineering Manager