The Dish’s Weekly Biotechnology News Wrap Up – January 13, 2017

In Case You Missed It, Recent Articles on Cell Culture Dish and Downstream Column:

Development of Animal-free Peptones for Mammalian and Microbial Culture

Cell culture media optimization continues to play a critical role in both increasing titers and providing a mechanism for modifying protein quality. One way to optimize media is to include supplements that improve productivity or protein characteristics. As a result, there is an interest in developing novel animal-free supplements that can impact these processes for both mammalian and microbial culture. It is important to note that supplements chosen to enhance media can have dramatic effects, both positively and negatively, on productivity, growth and protein quality. This highlights the importance of understanding what the drivers of the cell culture process are in order to identify appropriate supplements.

Cool Tool – Fluid Transfer Sets Specifically Designed for Sterile Transfer of Cell Therapy Based Products

As the Cell Therapy industry increasingly moves from research to clinical trials and commercial manufacturing, it is necessary to scale up manufacturing processes to meet increasing product demand. Clinical and commercial manufacturing also requires that the manufacturing process be compatible with quality and regulatory expectations to ensure safety.

Electroporation-based Transfection Demonstrates Consistent Antibody Quality and Glycosylation Patterns for Biotherapeutic Product Development

Increasingly, companies are choosing CHO-based transient production of antibodies in early biopharmaceutical development over stable cell line generation. The advantage of using transient transfection is that it takes significantly less time and cost to generate material when compared with the alternative of developing a genetically stable cell line for manufacturing. This is particularly important in drug development where preclinical material is needed quickly in order to make informed go/no go decisions. Having access to preclinical material faster and with less cost can greatly impact the overall drug development timeline.

Cool Tool – Kits to Simplify and Standardize Your Immune Cell Cultures

Cells of the immune system, including macrophages, dendritic cells, B cells, T cells, and NK cells are actively being used for many research and therapeutic applications. Cell Therapy, immunotherapy, and drug discovery are just a few areas where the culture, expansion, and differentiation of these immune cells is especially utilized. However, this culturing process is not trivial. Maintaining, differentiating, and expanding immune cells can be difficult. In addition, many scientists use immune cells in their cross-disciplinary research. While these scientists are experts in their area of research, they are often not experts in culturing immune cells, in particular, the methods used to differentiate and expand them in culture.

Optimization of a Protein A Chromatography Process for a Herceptin® Biosimilar (Trastuzumab)

As part of our Boston Biotech Week 2016 coverage, we will be writing about some of the posters presented at the conference. One poster that caught my eye for downstream was presented by Oncobiologics and JSR Life Sciences, “Optimization of a Protein A Chromatography Process for a Herceptin® Biosimilar (Trastuzumab).” In the poster, Oncobiologics and JSR Life Sciences describe the steps taken in identifying the most efficient chromatography process.

Cool Tool – SCOUT® technology reduces time to market and increases chance of success for biopharmaceutical products

Only 1 out of each 50 biopharmaceutical new product candidates makes it through the research phase into clinical trial testing and subsequently to the market. This high attrition rate is predominantly in the early development phases and is attributed to (I) undesired pharmacokinetics profile (39%), (II) lack of efficacy (30%), (III) in vivo toxicity in preclinical model (11%), (IV) adverse effect in humans (10%), and (V) other reasons, of which most commonly commercial arguments based on cost of goods (10%). It is therefore imperative that technologies become available that allow significant de-risking of biopharmaceutical product trajectories in the early research and development phase. The importance of this has been recognized by the field with the introduction of the “Design of Experiments” (DoE) approach, identifying critical quality attributes and performance attributes like yield, glycosylation, potency, and consumable costs of a manufacturing process. Owing to the DoE approach, scientists now have a tool to strategize the development of a novel product candidate. That said, it is often found that due to the complexity of many novel molecules, the number of parameters that need to be tested still requires vast numbers of experiments which are time consuming and costly.

2016 BioProcess International Award Winners – Downstream and Facilities

At this year’s Boston Biotech Week the 2016 BioProcess International Award Winners were announced. These awards recognize outstanding achievements in the area of biotherapeutic development and manufacturing processes. This year individuals and companies that made significant contributions to improving biotherapeutics were recognized. Novel technologies in upstream, downstream and analytical application areas were also awarded. I have listed the winners and finalists along with a brief description of the winning achievements for downstream technologies here. For a list of upstream and analytical technology winners, please see 2016 BioProcess International Award Winners – Upstream and Analytical.

Gain Productivity in Protein Purification through Column Loading Optimization

Because Protein A is a valuable resource in any mAb purification strategy, companies often search for ways to improve the productivity of their affinity chromatography step. One strategy worth further investigation is variable column loading. By varying residence time (RT) over the loading phase, productivity from an affinity chromatography step can be significantly improved.