BioPharm International-07-01-2007

Sir Isaac Newton said, back in 1676, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Newton's modest self-assessment of his scientific competence holds relevance in today's debate on the value of scientific meetings, and our quest for faster scientific discovery.

We're seeing an uptick in biotech investing from the venture capital community, a good sign that biotech can rise even higher than the broader markets.

The BIO annual meeting in early May had an upbeat tone. Investment capital is flowing into the industry at high levels, resulting in strong demand for contract development services. The funding stream is particularly strong in the US, and that is attracting more European contract manufacturers (CMOs) eager to improve business development here.

Most Chinese biopharmaceuticals are relatively small and there are not enough of them to sustain a robust services sector.

Now equipment makers are designing new systems that can be deployed rapidly, are less costly to build, and require less water and power to operate.

Quality guidelines are only as good as their implementation.

The AutovaxID is a self-contained, completely enclosed, fully automated hollow fiber bioreactor that permits rapid, efficient scale up of patient-derived cells. It is based on hollow fiber bioreactor technology and is an ideal system for high-density cell culture and the production of monoclonal antibodies or other therapeutic proteins.

Process development and manufacturing for biopharmaceuticals are often disjointed activities. Disconnects among groups are aggravated by a lack of common terminology and poor data management practices. A UK biotech consortium has initiated a collaborative development effort to address data management issues. The proposed outcome is a data model, based on the ISA-88 Standard for Batch Control, to capture process and facility data throughout the product lifecycle. A data framework that follows the ISA-88 model can simplify process scale up and enable early views of project costs and facility fit.