BioPharm: Given the diversity of forms for vaccines (i.e., VLPs, viruses, protein antigens), what strategies do you have for ensuring your facility can meet the demands of such varied production requirements?

Chacón: We can work with a variety of systems with relative ease, and this has to do with how our GMP services were started. We were in the business of providing preclinical services for around 17 or 18 years. We developed a number of skills and capabilities at smaller scale and with different reagent grades to produce recombinant proteins, VLPs, and different viral vectors including adenovirus, and lentivirus. We had to build those capabilities, and add the analytics required to oversee a process and characterize the final product. When we added GMP manufacturing, it was a very logical extension of those preclinical services. We went ahead and built in the versatility to support a variety of services.

Technology changes, and we need to embrace that. The challenge is on us, to look to the future and anticipate those changes to remain at the cutting edge and be of greatest help and assistance to our clients. We need to be mindful of how the marketplace changes, because to be successful at growing a company you need to be sure that your offerings are in tune with such demands. Today, the large pharmaceutical companies that used to do everything on their own send out many projects including vaccine production services. In fact, it goes across the whole panorama of needs, from preclinical targets, to vaccine candidates, to GMP manufacturing for clinical trials. By keeping a keen eye as to where those demands are coming from, what type of technologies the marketplace is asking us to provide, we need to be swift and nimble and move with the times.