Articles should explore the interactions of multidisciplinary functions and discuss the scientific application of experimental design methodologies as part of the product manufacturing process. Individual topics could include formulation, clinical phases, manufacturing, technology transfer, production scale-up, and optimization.
Transitioning from lab manufacture to commercialization presents significant challenges, no matter what area you’re working in. Cell and gene therapies are no different and production quantities must scale at multiple stages, first to support clinical trials and then when they reach the market. With uniquely challenging conditions required to protect medicinal integrity and exceptionally high...
The validation of media and buffer mixing is a continuing area of resource constraint in the pharmaceutical industry. These validations require materials, validation associates’ time, and the use of equipment and processing areas. This article proposes a risk-based life cycle for minimizing mixing validation resource inputs, with the objective of optimizing validation efforts through the use...
Pressures on pharmaceutical companies from regulators, governments, and competitors are forcing them to closely examine expenditure. But making cost savings while ensuring the standard of products remains high is problematic. Recent developments in process analytical technology have opened a door to reduced manufacturing costs without compromising product quality.
Live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) have the potential to treat a wide range of ailments. However, these living microorganisms are difficult to produce due to evolving government regulations and limited GMP manufacturing experience. New facility designs and more specific process guidance could help overcome these challenges. This article explores the nuances of facility design and regulatory...
Transitioning from lab manufacture to commercialization presents significant challenges, no matter what area you’re working in. Cell and gene therapies are no different and production quantities must scale at multiple stages, first to support clinical trials and then when they reach the market. With uniquely challenging conditions required to protect medicinal integrity and exceptionally high...
The validation of media and buffer mixing is a continuing area of resource constraint in the pharmaceutical industry. These validations require materials, validation associates’ time, and the use of equipment and processing areas. This article proposes a risk-based life cycle for minimizing mixing validation resource inputs, with the objective of optimizing validation efforts through the use...
Pressures on pharmaceutical companies from regulators, governments, and competitors are forcing them to closely examine expenditure. But making cost savings while ensuring the standard of products remains high is problematic. Recent developments in process analytical technology have opened a door to reduced manufacturing costs without compromising product quality.
Live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) have the potential to treat a wide range of ailments. However, these living microorganisms are difficult to produce due to evolving government regulations and limited GMP manufacturing experience. New facility designs and more specific process guidance could help overcome these challenges. This article explores the nuances of facility design and regulatory...
Cell and gene therapy (C>) products comprise a rapidly growing field of innovative medicines that hold the promise to treat and, in some cases, cure diseases that are otherwise untreatable. In this article, we provide points to consider when evaluating the comparability of C> when changes are made in their manufacturing processes.
There is much that large-scale commercial stem cell therapy processes can adopt from the existing bioprocessing industry. This article addresses some of the unique challenges posed by large-scale stem cell and stem cell–derived product manufacturing processes, and what should be considered while designing a manufacturing facility.
The field of advanced therapeutic medicinal products (ATMPs) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years. The Emerging Leaders (EL) community from the Belgium and Germany/Austria/Switzerland (D/A/CH) affiliates collaborated to develop an inclusive series of online seminars on ATMPs. This article gives highlights of the speakers, topics, and knowledge shared in ATMP online seminars...
In the interest of understanding the current state of continuous manufacturing for biologics and to facilitate the path toward adoption of these promising technologies, the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) and BioPhorum jointly sponsored a hybrid workshop. This article summarizes trends from the workshop and ponders next steps.
Continuous manufacturing (CM) challenged regulators’ expectations and regulatory frameworks. This article discusses how US regulators addressed the regulatory hurdles related to CM to broaden its adoption through engagement, regulatory science, guidance, and international harmonization.
While financial investment in novel therapies provides patients with new treatment options and improved quality of care, the pharmaceutical industry also recognizes its responsibility to transition toward more sustainable development, manufacturing, and stewardship of medicines throughout their life cycle.
Resounding clinical successes and maturation of extensive therapeutic pipelines have catapulted oligonucleotides from a fringe modality to therapeutic relevance in just a few short years. Oligonucleotides are a cornerstone of a burgeoning class of drugs classified as nucleic acid therapeutics. These therapies interact with DNA and RNA targets rather than traditional protein therapeutic...
In 2020, the world was grappling with how to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and appropriately treat people who had the COVID-19 infection without approved therapies or vaccines. In two years, there are multiple vaccines and treatments along with great knowledge about the virus—and about how the industry mobilized, partnered, and achieved tremendous strides in addressing the global...
Operation Warp Speed coordinated US government support of the pharmaceutical industry’s effort to develop and deliver vaccines and therapeutics across the United States to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. This article provides an inside look at the work done by this team to address the threat posed by COVID-19.
The implementation of a mammalian cell-based biopharmaceutical manufacturing process demands robust methods for knowledge handling, from early-stage development and technology transfer to production scale. Mathematical process modeling can summarize this knowledge as the relationships of critical quality attributes to critical process parameters using mathematical equations and sound...
Heightened awareness, due to the pandemic, of the need for domestic manufacturing capacity has rejuvenated the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry and resulted in new commissioning projects. However, cross-country/continental travel restrictions and social distancing–based work protocols during the first two years of the pandemic necessitated adopting unique commissioning approaches....
With the publication of recent guidance, specifically the US FDA Quality Systems Approach to Pharmaceutical cGMP Regulations1 and the...
With the rise of new technologies and predictive analytics capable of handling the huge amounts of data within and across existing information systems, Industry 4.0 has been thriving in many sectors, such as industrial automation, financial technology, retail, and semiconductors. But the health sector in general,1
Historically, cell therapies are used to treat patients with cancer after relapse from other approved treatment modalities, or if no approved treatment is available. However, the introduction of allogeneic cell therapies has created exciting opportunities to broaden access to cell-based treatments. With advancements in manufacturing, developers are becoming increasingly interested in...
The process of bringing new drugs and products to market requires creativity, thinking outside the box, and the courage to fail numerous times before making a single discovery. This rings especially true now, as the industry faces the COVID-19 pandemic and doubts about vaccines and therapies getting to market in record time to improve human health. This article presents a deep dive into gene...
With so many options for personalizing our lives, is the personalization of medicine far behind? With all the data available, how can the industry bring personalized medicine to patients? This article explores what is currently available and where the pharmaceutical industry can move forward to better serve patient needs.
Viral inactivation (VI) is a critical step in ensuring the safety of monoclonal antibody (mAb), Fc fusion, and recombinant protein therapeutics and it is typically an important component of an overall virus control strategy for downstream biotherapeutic production processes. Considerations for successful implementation of an inline VI process are discussed in this article.
Continuous manufacturing (CM) offers one way the pharmaceutical industry can accelerate development of the drug product control strategy to ensure a robust and reliable supply of medicine to the clinic and/or market. This article explores the promise of continuous manufacturing in enhancing accelerated development, as evidenced by experience in solid oral products.
Powder for oral suspension (PfOS) bioavailability is mostly on the basis of drug absorption from the gastrointestinal tract. PfOS formulation pH, viscosity, vehicle buffer capacity, drug particle size distribution, density, and viscosity are often critical for absorption. Therefore, careful design and selection of excipients—including suspending agents—are necessary during PfOS formulation...
What if the reliability of a system could be improved by accessing the standard data provided with modern process instrumentation? These data, accessed from existing instrumentation, can be used to analyze the fitness of processes, equipment, and instruments; better understand processes; support discrepancy investigations; and provide a data-driven basis for the timing of maintenance and...
Digital transformation and digitalization are on the agenda for all organizations in the biopharmaceutical industry. But what are the main enablers of intelligent manufacturing? We hypothesize that data science–derived manufacturing process and product understanding is the main driver of digitalization in the bioprocessing industry for biologics manufacturing. In this article, the first of a...
Drug developers know that the odds of anyone compound demonstrating safety and efficacy for a disease and its affected populations are low. How can drug developers improve these odds and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of drug development? One useful tool is model-informed drug development (MIDD), which uses computer models to inform the design of clinical trials or to run...
Oligonucleotides are a relatively new class of drugs, composed of natural and synthetic nucleotides, which primarily include small interfering RNA (siRNA), micro RNA (miRNA), and antisense oligonucleotide (ASO). These molecules achieve therapeutic effects through RNA interference, degradation, or splice-modulating pathways.1
The individual stories of patients—and their families—are welcome reminders to the pharmaceutical industry about just how meaningful pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and delivery are every day to those patients and their families.
Vaccine development is an intricate undertaking, which may involve numerous challenges from the initial process of identifying an antigen to the final steps of delivering and administering the licensed product. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the science of vaccine development. As the world awaits a vaccine for the coronavirus, manufacturers face unprecedented pressure to respond...
The solubility behavior of drugs remains one of the most challenging aspects of formulation development and is a key determinant of a drug’s bioavailability. This article describes research aimed to improve solubility of a poorly water-soluble drug (ibuprofen) by preparing a porous solid dispersion using a flash evaporation technique.
Regulatory authorities have approved the use of recombinant monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to treat infectious diseases1
and chronic conditions such as cancer
Medical treatments and pharmaceuticals are indispensable in improving quality of life. In recent years, however, pharmaceutical compounds have become a significant group of environmental pollutants, shown to pose risks to human health and have adverse environmental effects.
Presenters and a panel of FDA regulators and industry experts discussed key regulatory and industry issues during the closing plenary of the 2019 ISPE Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing...
Risk management is pervasive throughout the biopharmaceutical industry. It is an important factor during the implementation of new equipment or procedures into an operation. Likewise, risk management is also key when assessing the impact of changes. When doing a root cause analysis, evaluation of the risks becomes central to define the potential solutions to the problem analyzed and to...
Newer container closure integrity (CCI) test methods are more accurate and reliable than longtime industry standards. Transitioning to include deterministic testing alongside probabilistic methods may seem daunting at first, but it is in the industry’s best interest.
Despite introducing modern analytical technology to assess blend uniformity, many companies are still using traditional blend sampling thieves and wet chemistry to assess blend homogeneity. The use of statistically based sampling plans allows variance component analysis to be conducted on both blend and dosage unit data. This article shows how various combinations of blend and dosage unit...
This article is Part 2 of a two-part series exploring what we can learn from examples of pharmaceutical products being approved using accelerated programs. The series focuses on challenges that chemistry, manufacturing, and control (CMC) development teams may encounter when a project is given accelerated development status. In
A fundamental flaw in the way the industry develops manufacturing processes could be the reason.
Sampling is the selection of a representative portion of the population to make inferences about the entire population. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, samples are drawn from different stages of the process for both controlling process parameters and assessing drug product quality. In the case of a traditional batch process, a fixed amount of material is processed and the batch quality is...
This article presents the work of the newly formed ISPE Holistic Production Control Strategy Working Group, which has identified and summarized the need for a redefined control strategy implementation methodology.
Biopharmaceutical products manufactured from mammalian or microbial cells are inherently at risk of contamination from two major types of entities.
