Downstream Processing

Operating costs are the white-hot issue in the boardrooms of our life sciences clients and they tend to rule the site selection process. A soft economy, worldwide trade competition, drug cost containment pressures from the US government, and a lean and mean message sent by the venture capital community mean that quantitative factors that focus on the cost of doing business are trumping qualitative lifestyle factors, especially when evaluating sites for a new biopharmaceutical facility.

Is it realistic to believe that tangential flow filtration (TFF), commonly used for concentration, desalting, buffer exchange, and protein fractionation, is now a viable alternative to centrifugation for cell harvest and cell lysate clarification? A new generation of membranes expands the possibilities for TFF as an economical, efficient, high-yielding process substitute, according to this case study?s author.

Filterability trials are essential to the successful evaluation of total throughput of single filters or filter combinations. As such, they must be comparable. This case study examines the differences among various devices used and suggests necessary action required to achieve comparability of filterability test trials with 47 mm disc composites.

Pharma industry equipment utilization hovers below 40 percent, which would be an unacceptable figure in most industries.

The concentration range of proteins in human plasma spans approximately twelve orders of magnitude, with 85 to 90% of the protein mass distributed across as few as six proteins.

Subcutaneous administration is likely to be an important factor in generating an immunogenic response.

Misinterpreting the effluent profiles obtained during tracer measurements performed for determining packing quality can often lead to excessively large percolation velocities and exaggeration of packing problems. Highly useful and reliable information can be obtained through characterization of tracer effluent curves using the method of moments, information that could be critical for successful scale-up of chromatographic steps. This is the sixth in the "Elements of Biopharmaceutical Production" series.

Disposable technology has been used effectively as a process solution for over 25 years and new uses and applications are constantly being developed. The key to all applications is the ability to pre-sterilize components and systems with gamma radiation and package them against contamination.

In a mere 30 years of development, a total of 23 MAbs and MAb-related proteins have been approved for medical treatments.

An anionic column with modified chitosan bead matrix performs well in purifying cell culture. A pair of cationic-exchange columns shows promise in purifying S25 antibody.

Saturated fractional factorial plans minimize the number of trials by one-half or better, which saves time and money.

Creation and qualification of scale-down models is essential for performing several critical activities that support process validation and commercial manufacturing. This combined article is the fifth in the "Elements of Biopharmaceutical Production" series. Part 1 (March 2005) covered fermentation. In this segment, we present some guidelines and examples for scale-down of common downstream unit operations used in biotech processes - chromatography and filtration.

When you don't know the answer to a question, ask an expert. If the question is really big, ask more experts. If you have a collection of difficult questions, run a poll of many experts. That, in effect, was the impetus for Eden Biodesign to survey 670 BioPharm International subscribers with questions as to what will be the development mechanism to achieve safe, effective, and cheap new medicines.

Disposable products and systems have come a long way since they first entered the small-lab market in the 1970s. Today they are available for practically every aspect of biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Disposable systems are used for filtration, clarification, purification, and separation applications used in the production of vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and other therapies. As the use of disposable systems grows, the concept of a completely disposable manufacturing process is becoming a reality.

The drive to develop better, faster, and smaller - in other words, more efficient - products is a universal trend in the modern world. This trend has profoundly impacted many industries from microelectronics to packaging equipment. In the biopharmaceutical industry, the need to speed and simplify the long and complex drug manufacturing processes brings additional challenges, such as meeting regulatory requirements.

Manufacturing changes - such as changes in formulation or source material - can impact a product’s immunogenicity.

In order to institute a GxP mindset across the organization, support and respect for quality systems should come from the top down.

Protein solutions used for research, vaccines, or therapeutics need to be free of contaminants. One of the chief concerns is the presence of endotoxins (lipopolysaccharides) because their removal from protein solutions is a challenge. Typically, removal techniques utilize adsorption onto surfaces of beads in batch reactions, onto beads packed in columns, or onto membrane surfaces.

Human plasma provides a rich source of therapeutic medicines, including gamma globulins, coagulation factors, albumin, alpha anti-trypsin, and others. In 2001, sales of immuno gamma-globulin (IgG) were estimated at $2 billion with a production rate of 50 metric tons for the year.1 A number of new therapeutic products have recently been introduced including Gammimune from Bayer, RhoPhylac from ZLB Behring, and Octagam from Octapharma.

By Rajiv Nayar and Mark C. Manning, HTD Biosystms, Inc., pp. 20-28. Outsourcing is often considered a way to expedite drug development, but other options exist for companies that don't choose it yy} or that run up against the capacity shortage. The resources devoted to speeding up the drug discovery process led to combinatorial libraries, high-throughput screening, proteomics, and genomics. Now the same types of innovation can be applied to drug development to prevent valuable lead compounds from sitting idle on the shelf.

by Harish Iyer, Felicia Henderson, Eric Cunningham, James Welbb, John Hanson, Christopher Bork, and Lynn Conley, IDEC Pharmaceuticals Corporation Scale-up changes in an antibody purification process can increase final product purity, make the process more robust, and reduce processing time. This case study focuses on the initial purification step -- protein A chromatography -- and offers data collected from several years of process development work on many different antibodies.