The breakthrough approach is commonly used, but the devil is in the details.

Determining and Optimizing Dynamic Binding Capacity

In this article, a simple chromatographic model is proposed that is capable of predicting the impact of pH and ionic strength on HIC chromatograms.

Purification of Protein by HIC: Mechanistic Modeling for Improved Understanding and Optimization

The COVID-19 vaccines opened the door to powerful market potential for other nucleic acid-based therapies.

Ramping Up Development of Nucleic Acid Therapies

The innovation of going from stainless-steel bioreactors to fixed-bed bioreactors shows an evolution in upstream optimization.

Exploring the Impact of Fixed-Bed Bioreactors in Upstream Processing

Makers of specialty biologics, gene therapies, and other personalized medicines are working to identify and reduce potential supply chain risks both upstream and downstream.

Reducing Vulnerabilities in Upstream and Downstream Supply Chains

FDA has spurred investment to create and develop 600 therapies.

Kudos and Hurdles in Tackling Rare Diseases

What can we take away from Pfizer's acquisition of Seagen?

 Zauberkugel: Pfizer’s Seagen Acquisition

Feliza Mirasol is the science editor for 

invoX Pharma, a UK-based wholly owned subsidiary of China-based Sino Biopharmaceutical, announced on June 1, 2023 the completion of a second tranche of investment in pHion Therapeutics, a UK-based vaccine development company. The investment is meant to further develop next-generation messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.

The investment will support growth of pHion’s proprietary RALA platform. One of the first priorities will be the advancement of PTX_V1, pHion’s lead project, into clinical trials in the first half of 2024. PTX_V1 is a first-in-class therapeutic vaccine in development for treating human papilloma virus-related cancers. pHion’s pipeline also includes differentiated therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of ovarian (PTX_V5) and prostate (PTX_V3) cancers.

Operating with its RALA platform, pHion can deliver anionic molecules such as mRNA and self-amplifying RNA in a stealth-like way. This behavior evades detection and allows for the generation of a potent antigen-specific CD8+ T-cell response. The benefit of the RALA peptide-based drug delivery system lays in its 30-amino-acid sequence, which condenses anionic cargo—irrespective of size—into nanoparticles that are highly efficient at cellular entry and are able to outperform currently available technologies, according to a company press release. Compared with traditional mRNA vaccine delivery platforms, the RALA platform’s advantage includes ease of scalability and logistics, including stability at room temperature.

“At pHion Therapeutics, it is our mission to pioneer next-generation, first-in-class vaccines for infectious disease and oncology through stealth-like delivery of mRNA. With the additional support from invoX, we are set to accelerate our lead candidate, PTX_V1, to be ready for the clinic in 2024 and further develop our exciting preclinical pipeline of therapeutic and prophylactic mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines have the potential to truly transform healthcare interventions globally, and pHion will be at the forefront of this transformation, enabled by the RALA platform delivery technology,” said Helen McCarthy, CEO and founder of pHion, in the press release.

“We are delighted to have completed this additional investment in pHion,” said Ben Toogood, CEO of invoX, in the release. “invoX’s resources, global reach, and innovative R&D platform can help the company reach its potential and deliver treatments for patients around the world suffering from cancer and infectious diseases. We look forward to seeing PTX_V1 reach the clinic and supporting this program into the next stages of its development.”

Articles

invoX Pharma has made a second tranche of investment in pHion Therapeutics to support further development of next-generation mRNA vaccines.

invoX Pharma Invests in pHion Therapeutics to Develop Next-Generation mRNA Vaccines

On June 1, 2023, Lonza announced that it acquired Synaffix, a Netherlands-based biotechnology company with an antibody drug conjugate (ADC) technology platform. Under the deal, Lonza will initially pay €100 million (US$107 million) in cash and up to €60 million (US$64 million) in additional performance-based consideration. While it is now a Lonza company, Synaffix will continue to operate under the Synaffix name and will further expand its operations in Oss, The Netherlands, to prepare for further innovation and growth.

Synaffix’s ADC technology platform includes payload and site-specific linker technologies that will enhance and extend Lonza’s integrated ADC services, including Lonza’s early-phase offering. The ADC technology platform comprises proprietary GlycoConnect, HydraSpace, and toxSYN technologies, which can significantly enhance the efficacy and tolerability of ADCs, according to a company press release.

Through the acquisition, Lonza will combine its development and manufacturing capabilities with Synaffix’s ADC technology platform, which the companies expect will provide a comprehensive service to rapidly discover, develop, scale up, and commercialize novel and differentiated ADCs. The combination is also expected to streamline the path from discovery to clinic and commercialization.

“The acquisition of Synaffix underlines the strategic position of bioconjugates within Lonza’s portfolio, expands our offering in this fast-growing market and enhances our value proposition for clinical customers. With Synaffix, our combined … knowledge and capabilities have the capacity to support both clinical and commercial needs,” said Ulrich Osswald, vice-president, Licensing, Lonza, in the press release.

“On our mission to bring Synaffix’s ADC technologies to patients, we are excited to become part of Lonza, and, thus, through strong and immediate synergies, ensure a robust technology and manufacturing platform for our licensees as they progress into the late-stage clinical and commercial development phase. We can now also leverage the potential offered by Lonza to fast-track technology innovations in bioconjugates beyond cytotoxic ADCs,” said Peter van de Sande, CEO, Synaffix, in the release.

Lonza will gain access to R&D capabilities, including payload and site-specific linker technology, through its acquisition of ADC company, Synaffix.

Lonza Acquires Synaffix in ADC Deal

Adamis Pharmaceuticals announced the closing of its merger with DMK Pharmaceuticals on May 25, 2023.

The focus for the closing is the effort to increase sales of Adamis’s commercial products and advancing DMK’s lead clinical stage compound, DPI-125, which is being studied as a potential novel treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). Further, the stock of Adamis will continue to trade on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker symbol “ADMP.” In addition, Ebrahim Versi, CEO of DMK, was named CEO and Adamis and chairman of the Board of Directors at the close of the merger.

“We are very excited about this merger, as I believe that the combined company will make a significant contribution to saving and improving the lives of people suffering from opioid use disorder,” said Versi in the press release. “Too many lives are cut far too short, and families are devastated by this disease, and we need to act urgently to reverse this epidemic. ZIMHI, I believe, is the most effective naloxone medicine to reverse fentanyl overdoses and my goal will be to make this our flagship product and to build on that with our novel first-in-class compound, DPI-125. Not only does it have the potential to treat patients with opioid use disorder but also, I believe, to prevent it when used as a potent analgesic, thus obviating the need for use of opiates. The global opioid market in 2021 was reported as being greater than $22 billion. Given the differentiated profiles of these agents, along with our large portfolio of novel compounds, I see a bright future for the company.”

In preparation of the closing of the merger, which happened on May 22, 2023, Adamis effected a 1-for-70 reverse stock split of all its issued and outstanding shares of common stock. Further, all outstanding options, restricted stock unit awards, and warrants were proportionately adjusted, following their respective terms.

Adamis Pharmaceuticals Closes Merger with DMK Pharmaceuticals 

 Washington Editor, jillwechsler7@gmail.com.

Confusion recently arose over whether and how Medicare will cover new Alzheimer’s treatments, but the fine print indicates that reimbursement for such medicines still will occur only with the completion of studies to support full FDA approval. And even with that imprimatur from FDA, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will limit reimbursement to patients who enroll in physicians’ registries. While one treatment for this widespread condition may gain full approval next month, accelerated approval status remains insufficient to support reimbursement by the federal government.

 on June 1, 2023 that Medicare will cover drugs in this new class of Alzheimer’s treatment that receive “traditional approval” from FDA. However, the fine print stipulated that coverage will only apply to those who participate in a registry to collect real-world data that can further assess the usefulness of these drugs for elderly patients. CMS ignited controversy in 2022 when it decided to only pay for treatment of those few patients participating in confirmatory studies, under its coverage-with-evidence-development program.

The first drug likely to qualify for full approval is Leqembi from Eisai, which is scheduled for an 

of its confirmatory studies on June 9. FDA granted accelerated approval for the treatment in January, but CMS limited coverage to those patients enrolled in confirmatory trials, as it did earlier with Biogen’s Aduhelm. In addition, Eli Lilly hopes to provide sufficient data to gain full approval for its Alzheimer’s therapy by year-end.

 Alzheimer’s Association protested CMS’ requirement 

for registry enrollment as erecting “an unnecessary barrier” to coverage. While patient registries are “important tools for gathering much needed real-world evidence” to improve patient care, they should not be used to limit access to an FDA-approved treatment, the patient advocates stated.

(BIO) described CMS’ policy as reinforcing criticism of FDA accelerated approval and raised concerns that these challenges to accelerated approval will limit patient access to treatment and curb future innovation.Some members of Congress and patient groups agree with FDA on the importance of permitting broad access to potentially beneficial treatments, especially for severe conditions affecting small patient populations.

It really all comes down to money: the high cost of new Alzheimer’s treatments and potentially millions of patients likely to seek treatment would run up Medicare prescription drug budget exponentially.

Reimbursement for Alzheimer's medicines still will occur only with the completion of studies to support full FDA approval.

Medicare Still Won’t Pay for Alzheimer’s Drugs without Confirmatory Data

FDA approved the oral antiviral Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir tablets and ritonavir tablets) for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19 on May 25, 2023. This is the fourth drug and first oral antiviral pill approved by FDA to treat COVID-19 in adults. Paxlovid is not approved or authorized for use as a pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis for prevention of COVID-19, according to the press release.

“While the pandemic has been challenging for all of us, we have made great progress mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on our lives,” said Patrizia Cavazzoni, MD, director for FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a company press release. “Today’s approval demonstrates that Paxlovid has met the agency’s rigorous standards for safety and effectiveness, and that it remains an important treatment option for people at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including those with prior immunity. The FDA remains committed to working with sponsors to facilitate the development of new prevention and treatment options for COVID-19.”

The approval was based on the final results of the EPIC-HR clinical trial, which was a randomized, double-blind clinical trial that studied Paxlovid for the treatment of non-hospitalized symptomatic adults with a laboratory confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The results showed that Paxlovid significantly reduced the proportion of people with COVID-19 related hospitalization or death from any cause through 28 days of follow-up by 86% compared to placebo among patients treated within five days of symptom onset and who did not receive COVID-19 therapeutic monoclonal antibody treatment, according to the press release.

Paxlovid is not approved or authorized for use as a pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis for prevention of COVID-19.

FDA Approves Paxlovid for Treatment of COVID-19 in Adults 

After more than a decade of debate and discussion, FDA has published a new system for providing basic and essential information on patient use of drugs and certain biologic products. A 

new one-page Patient Medication Information (PMI) guide

 would replace the more complex and lengthy Patient Package Inserts (PPIs) now distributed in pharmacies dispensing prescription medicines.

The aim of the new program is to reduce drug misuse and adverse reactions by providing accurate information on product indications and uses to help people take prescription medicines safety and effectively,

in unveiling the new proposal May 30, 2023. Currently, the different types of information on prescription drugs as now required can be confusing and prompt patients to stop taking medications or to use them inappropriately, leading to treatment failures, hospitalizations and even deaths.

a one-page document that highlights essential information on product use and would be given to patients with their medications, including certain biological products provided in outpatient settings. The information also will be available online for public access. FDA anticipates that by reducing duplicative information, the new system will be more cost-efficient for drug and biotech manufacturers. The new format also will support translation of PMI to other languages and facilitate the use of technologies to convert the information to additional formats. FDA estimates that its proposal would cost approximately $20 million a year to implement, but would yield greater benefits and savings, largely from safer and more appropriate use of medicines.

To realize such gains, sponsors of new drugs will seek FDA approval of PPIs as part of new drug applications (NDAs) or biologics licensed applications (BLAs). In addition, manufacturers of already approved medicines will have to revise existing patient information documents and file supplemental applications to gain PMI approval. The greater burden on industry will involve updating systems for printing and packaging PMIs with medicines, an undertaking that has generated objections to previous FDA proposals for revising required information for patients. To facilitate these changes, the agency outlines a five-year implementation schedule, as it calculates that sponsors would have to submit labeling supplements for more than 2600 existing drugs and more than 1600 new drug applications.

Generic-drug makers face added complexities in converting current medication information to the new format, as they will have to refer to new PMIs of their reference listed drugs, once those are submitted to and approved by FDA. The agency says it will facilitate this process by creating PMI templates for approved abbreviated new drug applications if the reference drug has been withdrawn or lacks an approved PMI.

In recognition of the issues raised from past proposals, FDA requests comments from industry on the usefulness and appropriateness of this latest patient information plan, the accuracy of the agency’s estimate of the burden and cost of providing the requested information, ways to improve the PMI proposal, and strategies for a reducing the burden of collecting the requested information. Industry has six months to submit comments.

Jill Wechsler is Washington reporter for 

FDA has published a new system for providing basic and essential information on patient use of drugs and certain biologic products. 

FDA Proposes Streamlined Medication Handouts

Modernization, collaboration, and innovation are some of the most important concepts in the drug development sector due to how increasingly complex the therapeutic landscape is becoming. Despite high levels of investment being poured into the biopharma industry each year, many challenges that arise from the use of traditional models and processes still exist within drug development. For example, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) can find potential new molecules a thousand times faster than existing models, yet patients are not able to access the benefits because of bottlenecks in the development process, such as project management and collecting data (1).

However, hope is on the horizon as novel solutions and improvements aimed at benefitting the drug development process with the right framework are coming to the fore. Focusing on the patient, digital and technology enablement, and advanced analytics are a few ways that research and development have been given a kickstart in transforming traditional approaches; although, this is just the beginning of a long journey toward a more dynamic, beneficial drug development process (2).

Traditional drug development is a cost and time-intensive process, which has caused an array of issues in the past. Ted Broering, president of early clinical and bioanalytical solutions at ICON, mentions that apart from the standard objective of establishing drug safety in healthy volunteers, early phase trials are also on the critical pathway of collating data to determine if the drug holds potential for further development and label expansion. In terms of increasing costs and pressures for smaller timelines, he explains how early phase study designs have become the proverbial “kitchen sink” with multiple questions being asked that help determine the development pathway.

“These early protocols are now being written as ‘adaptive’ designs, allowing flexibility to adjust dose levels, to add or clarify sampling timepoints based on emerging data, and trial expansion if needed,” Broering says. “Long gone are the days of a simple ascending dose first in human (FIH) trial, now we can execute adaptive combination designs that would have once been conducted as four different trials—single ascending dose, multiple ascending dose, food effect, and patient arm all in one umbrella protocol.”

In terms of downstream processing, Heidi Jones, market development manager, Process Chromatography at Bio-Rad Laboratories, explains that column packing can be a very time consuming, resource intensive activity, requiring specialized equipment and training. “Additionally, variability in packing quality can lead to inconsistent lot-to-lot purification results,” she says. “Prepacked columns (packed with the appropriate resins, i.e., affinity, ion exchange, mixed mode, and so forth) can mitigate many of these issues and constraints to efficiency. [These prepacked options] provide consistent, FDA compliant columns that meet specific quality criteria” (3).

AI/machine learning types of applications have made a significant impact for analyzing large, linked data sets for accelerating drug development while reducing costs, according to Philip Russmeyer, founder and CEO of FITFILE, which was founded in 2020 by Philip to help deliver safer, faster, and better profiles of record-level health. He further elaborated on recent advances in genomic sequencing and clinical trials, as pharmaceutical companies are increasingly collaborating with academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations to share resources and non-commercially
sensitive information.

“Furthermore, advances in genomic sequencing are enabling more targeted drug development, facilitating faster drug approvals,” Russmeyer says. “For clinical trials, with record linkage and advanced analytics the right patients can now be quickly and efficiently identified and recruited (4), and site selection has become much easier with the arrival of more granular and dependable information” (5).

Russmeyer also emphasizes that regulatory bodies, like the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), have recently implemented new policies to streamline the drug approval process. “Under the latest MHRA framework, clinical trials application processes in the UK will be more proportionate, streamlined, and flexible without compromising on safety,” he says.

When asked about the 505(b)(2) pathway, Robert Lee, president at Lubrizol Life Science Health in the contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) division, points out that this strategy is effective at accelerating the process, repurposing drugs for different routes of administration, or developing a differentiated dosage form. “Differentiation can be in terms of better biological performance (i.e., lower dose) or a safer product (i.e., lower toxicity or reduced off target exposure). The safety packages are already out there for approved drugs, so there are fewer hurdles to overcome, shrinking the cost and development time significantly,” he explains. “One potential approach to achieving a successful 505(b)(2) repurposing is by utilizing novel excipients in combination with the existing, marketed APIs to make a product that is suitable for new routes of administration.”

Bottlenecks in data and project areas, along with other hurdles, can impact a drug development process by weeks, months, or years, and its overall influence on the lifespan of a drug development program can magnify more inefficiencies. Delays, added costs, and more can create less availability of new and innovative treatments for patients (1).

Tomasz Kostrzewski, PhD, VP, science and technology at CN Bio Innovations, explains that 90% of drugs that enter clinical trials fail to become approved medicines, and to avoid a “rubbish in–rubbish out” scenario, the problem needs to be addressed ahead of this phase before a significant reduction in attrition rates begins. “Prior drug development decisions regarding target and candidate selection are based upon in-vitro and in-vivo animal models with limited translational relevance as they either lack human complexity, or relevance. Recreating the human immune system poses a particularly significant challenge,” he says. “Within the development phase, animal studies are widely used to further evaluate the safety and efficacy of a drug candidate, to determine optimal dose/schedule for clinical trials and to inform regulatory submissions, but again, interspecies differences mean that the data from these studies often fail to translate into human outcomes.”

Kostrzewski also discusses how drug discovery is moving away from small molecule discovery toward newer drug classes, such as cell and gene therapies, antibodies, and peptides. “This new wave of therapeutics is the future; however, they provide new challenges due to their human-specific mechanism of action which [means] animals [are] less suited for their testing,” he says. “Non-human primates offer a solution, but their use is strictly regulated, costly, unsustainable, and ethically undesirable.”

Supply chain issues are a major hurdle facing early drug development, and Lee describes how challenging backlogs have been seen in the contract business, like contract research organizations (CROs), CDMOs, and API manufacturers. “If your pool of potential service providers shrinks, that’s going to impact the quality and timing of your development program,” he says. “Additionally, there are issues surrounding funding. It’s harder to get capital now, which can add extra pressure when developing new drugs.”

Jones comments that successfully expressing and purifying a potential drug therapeutic can be a challenge in the early drug development process. “Once a viable expression and production system is identified, developing an adequate, (and preferably) robust orthogonal purification process can be challenging and can become the bottleneck in moving a potential drug therapeutic to the next stage of the development process (i.e., for initial stability studies, in-vitro assays, analytics), particularly if expression titers are low, or if the therapeutic is prone to clipping or degradation,” she says.

Interestingly, Broering does not believe that there are specific bottlenecks per se, but that there is a growing demand within industry for early phase studies with a small group of patients as opposed to healthy volunteers. “These early phase patient studies can estimate the pharmacokinetic (PK) levels to see if the drug has the same profile as in healthy subjects and can also inform the design of later phase patient trials,” he comments. “Sponsors are looking for these studies for data comparison to be run under a Phase I setting with very tight timepoint collections which can be challenging.”

There are several approaches from different areas that the biopharmaceutical industry can take to alleviate the hurdles and avoid future issues that may have hindered companies in the past. According to Russmeyer, health data platforms have the capacity to help solve the “data problem” that drug developers are running into.

“If the right secure platform is deployed, approved persons can access a huge wealth of clinical and non-clinical health data linked at the record-level from a single point of access. This enables researchers to understand complete health profiles and how they relate to the efficacy of new drugs in patient populations over time, so they can more easily measure the impact and monitor safety,” Russmeyer explains. “These platforms’ privacy-preserving technology and high security standards help ensure the safe use of data to drive progress in the industry, ultimately improving outcomes for patients.”

For Kostrzewski, organ-on-a-chip (OOC) technology can help to ease these hurdles by enabling researchers to recreate models of human physiology and disease in the laboratory. “These lab-grown miniature organs and tissues are comprised of physiologically-relevant combinations of primary human cells grown on scaffolds to support 3D growth. They are perfused by media to mimic the blood stream and importantly, can incorporate elements of both the human adaptive and innate immune system,” he explains. “OOC models function and respond to therapeutics in a similar way to humans and deliver clinically relevant end points to facilitate the translation of data between the lab and clinic. It is possible to link models together to simulate processes such as drug absorption and metabolism, or to understand interactions between organs, such as inflammation, which drive disease and cause unexpected toxicities. Importantly, they offer a path forward for the discovery and development of new modality drugs with human specific modes of action in combination with other non-animal-based new alternative methodologies (NAMS) such as in-silico modeling.”

Kostrezewski adds that, going forward, he anticipates that OOC will start to reduce our reliance on costly and expensive animal studies in late discovery early development. “OOC use additionally enables the exploration of a greater experimental space, enabling study design to be fine-tuned to maximize their efficiency and reduce the number of animals used,” he says. “Further along the pipeline within development, OOC can even be used to confirm, or query the results generated in animal studies to overcome concerns about interspecies differences and enable researchers to either proceed into clinical trials with more confidence, or to reengineer drugs to remove any unwanted effects.”

According to Lee, novel excipients are perfect for the 505(b)(2) pathway to reduce both time and cost to approval. “With 505(b)(2) you want to have a differentiated, better dosage form than what was commercially available, and maybe a different route of administration. Novel excipients offer fresh intellectual property and can be offered on an exclusive basis to help protect the asset,” he explains. “Particularly in the early stages of drug development, selecting a CDMO with a wide range of capabilities and expertise can improve the probability and accelerate the process of reaching the target product profile. Flexibility is also important, particularly with high value products like biologics, you need to make sure there are no lower limitations on batch size.”

A variety of chromatography tools are available to assist drug developers in the purification process, Jones mentions. “From 96-well plate format for resin scouting, to process scale prepacked columns, researchers can perform design of experiment [DOE] studies through to process scale-up while eliminating the time spent manually packing columns, along with the need for specialized equipment, specialized training, as well as reducing packing variation, given that prepacked columns are required to adhere to specific and stringent quality controls,” she says (3).

Patient-centricity has been driving change within the drug development area for some time, and it continues to grow in importance. Technical development activities, like digitization of clinical trials, can help achieve this goal and accelerate the overall drug development process.

Ute Berger, president of development and commercialization solutions at ICON, explains the concept of digitization of clinical trials in more detail, which, if executed in the right way, has the potential to improve patient-centricity of trials and reduce potential failures. “Decentralized clinical trials have been shown to overcome some of the long-term industry challenges in drug development that have had a significant impact in timelines, such as patient recruitment and retention,” she elaborates. “According to Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development [CSSD] 41% of clinical trials fail to meet planned enrollment estimates and other industry figures suggest 30% patient drop out from trials” (6).

Berger further explains that there are some basic fundamentals in ensuring the technology is patient centric, including: ensuring the study design and technology interaction is developed to reduce rather than increase patient burden; ensuring patients have the option rather than making it mandatory to be monitored remotely, whether that is through digital health technologies or data capture at in-home visits; and most importantly, providing appropriate support both technical and clinical through specialized concierge services. “Concierge services can help with scheduling, welcoming patients, managing consent, responding to patient concerns, collecting reported events or retrieving equipment, all which increase patient satisfaction and lead to higher retention, to avoid delays,” she says.

The most important pillar of patient-centricity for Russmeyer is bringing the voices of real patients into the earliest phases of technical development, from study design to formulation and delivery decisions. “Analyzing data from patient focus groups and surveys will support drug companies to approach the technical development with a better understanding of how to improve patient engagement and participation in clinical trials, and how to improve adherence to and outcomes from new medications,” he says. “In addition, using safely anonymized data united across sources in a way that doesn’t require consent can fold in a patient-centric approach at a much larger, clinically valuable scale.”

Lee mentions that one might think there is enough of a challenge to commercialize a new molecular entity via a 505(b)(1) path so that patients can receive treatment as soon as possible without looking at novel delivery systems. However, new technologies are emerging all the time, with a major focus on patient-centricity upfront. “Drug–device combination products are a great example, for instance in the case of an autoinjector, where you could potentially self-administer at home, saving time by not having to go to the doctor’s office,” he explains. “Many drug developers are looking to new devices to overcome patient challenges of conventional delivery, and in fact we have an established department dedicated to drug-eluting devices such as vaginal rings, intraocular implants, and subcutaneous implants.”

More automated solutions, such as AI, are being widely implemented to improve efficiencies. The value of these types of technologies in the biopharmaceutical drug development area has become a tool for collaboration and innovation for many.

Russmeyer explains how AI can be deployed to analyze vast data sets much more quickly than has ever been possible before, which can accelerate drug discovery in several ways—for example, from identifying novel drug targets and potential drug candidates to identifying promising candidates for further development. “AI can also help streamline the drug development process by identifying potential safety issues and predicting how drugs will behave in the body. This can help reduce risks to trial participants, and the number of failed or aborted trials,” he adds. “It can assist in designing and optimizing drugs by predicting their properties, such as solubility, bioavailability, and toxicity. This can help drug developers make more informed decisions about drug design, leading to more effective and safer drugs.”

AI has become more than just an automation solution, in the words of Berger. “AI-powered capabilities, including pattern recognition and evolutionary modeling, are essential to gather, normalize, analyze, and harness that growth and fuel modern therapy development,” she says. “AI has many applications across the full drug development value chain. In pre-clinical R&D, AI is being used to identify novel drug candidates without the need for traditional wet chemistry. In clinical research, AI innovations are driving transformations in clinical trial execution, including improved trial design, the development of novel digital endpoints, and the use of real-world data to identify optimal research sites and patient populations.”

In terms of OOC, Kostrzewski reveals that it is possible to reap immediate benefits by integrating computational in-silico tools. “There are three obvious opportunities, firstly the use of in-silico modeling upfront to inform drug design. By doing so companies can reduce the numbers of molecules that need to be screened. This opens up the opportunity to use more predictive human organ assays, such as OOC, earlier in the development process and speeds up the hit to lead process,” he explains. “The second use of in-silico modeling for [DOE] ahead of OOC to identify the right parameters to test, or to ascertain a concentration range for target engagement in an OOC model that is human-relevant. Following an OOC screening study, in silico physiologically based pharmacokinetic [PBPK] modeling can then be used to extrapolate data to predict the human response for ultimate data translatability. Overall, this combined approach provides significant accuracy and efficiency gains and with addition of AI and machine learning the data generated from many OOC studies could be combined and used to help further predict human responses to different interventions and therapeutic treatment regimens.”

There are some approaches, solutions, and technologies already available that can help jumpstart a drug developer transition to a more agile and flexible way of working. For example, single use and continuous processing together are increasingly used in manufacturing facilities, which Jones explains enables manufacturing facilities to “pop-up” as needed with very little required infrastructure to house equipment.

“The single use aspect of continuous processing reduces batch-to-batch cross contamination, as well as providing a built-in sterile manufacturing environment. Prepacked columns are a great compliment to this type of manufacturing model, given that they are equipped with the features necessary to plug and play into continuous process systems, and as mentioned previously, provide consistent results and stringent quality controls,” Jones says. “I expect that we will see continued advancements in the use of AI in prediction software geared towards all aspects of the drug development process, including the prediction of purification processes.”

Additionally, more and more developers are reaching out to CDMOs to complement in-house competencies and resources, as it gives them a more flexible approach, remarks Lee. “This is especially true in the early stages of development, where CDMOs with wide-ranging expertise and techniques can enable a higher probability of achieving the target product profile,” he says. “Knowledge and experience with multiple delivery routes can help identify the most effective delivery system, then during scale-up, leveraging a CDMO can reduce risk, expense, and timescales of in-house investment.”

Real-world data has gained significant momentum in drug development, enabling sponsors to harness insights that were previously unavailable to support their product development and positioning. Berger raises the point that tokenization is well established in the commercial setting as a way of accessing multiple data sources for insights.

“However, clinical trial tokenization, which links patient-level data from diverse sources without compromising patient privacy and allowing sponsors to incorporate real-world data into clinical trial analysis and gain a comprehensive picture of the patient journey across the healthcare system and into the follow-up stage, has not yet been widely adopted,” Berger adds. “Both large pharma and biotech companies are exploring, piloting, and evaluating the potential of this solution which combines technology, data, and analytics and delivers valuable insights. If adopted widely, our approach to clinical development could be transformed.”

Conroy, D. Accelerating Drug Development to Keep Pace with Drug Discovery. 

Agrawal, G.; Keane H.; Prabhakaran, M.; Steinmann, M. 

The Pursuit of Excellence in New-Drug Development

. McKinsey & Company, Article, Nov. 1, 2019.

Kronbetter, L.; Khaled, S. (2023) Refining Process Separation Procedures with Prepacked Chromatography Columns. International Labmate, Article, April 12, 2023.

Baillie, K.; Mueller, T.; Pan, J.; et al. Use of Record Linkage to Evaluate Treatment Outcomes and Trial Eligibility in a Real-World Metastatic Prostate Cancer Population in Scotland. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf., 2020, 29 (6), 653–663.

Hurtado-Chong, A.; Joeris, A.; Hess, D.; Blauth, M. Improving Site Selection in Clinical Studies: A Standardised, Objective, Multistep Method and First Experience Results. BMJ Open, 2017, 7 (7), e014796.

Getz, K. Enrollment Performance: Weighing the “Facts.” 

When referring to this article, please cite it as Murphy, J. 

Moving Closer to Dynamic Drug Development

Hope is on the horizon as novel solutions and improvements aimed at benefitting the drug development process with the right framework are coming to the fore.

Moving Closer to Dynamic Drug Development 

Continued development of new and next-generation antibodies is spurred by the increasing demand for more effective and custom-tailored biologic therapies. While the bio/pharma industry is seeing a shift toward personalized medicines, ongoing work in research and drug discovery is generating new biologic modalities, such as next-generation antibodies.

In particular, bispecific antibodies are next in line after the decades of success that monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have had in the industry. Bispecifics were mainly developed for cancer treatment, notes Luca Varani, PhD, Structural Biology group leader at Switzerland’s Institute for Research in Biomedicine, and founder of CLBiotech, a 2022 start-up company focused on nanobody engineering.

Bispecifics (and beyond that, multispecific antibodies) can be simply viewed as a cocktail in a single molecule, or rather, the concept is that of a single molecule that has the property of a cocktail drug. However, Varani emphasizes, bispecifics can do things that a conventional cocktail drug cannot, and that is, bispecifics act synergistically. This is considered a novel mechanism of action, he notes. 

Read the related sidebar article, Pulling Out All the Stops in mAb Manufacturing, in the June 1, 2023 

“Bispecifics can achieve molecular functions that are not achievable by monoclonal antibodies,” Varani says. “If you think strategically, you could design a bispecific that acts like a cocktail.”

Ideally, Varani, says, a developer would want to look for bispecifics that do something that monoclonals cannot do, such as, for instance, having a bispecific that bridges two molecules on different cells. Or, another example could be using bispecifics to bridge different viruses, which would cause aggregation with the end result being that the virus is neutralized. Yet again, bispecifics can be used to bridge immune cells, such as T cells, to cancer cells.

“You attach the cancer cell on one end, and you bring the T cell immune system against the cancer with the other,” Varani demonstrates. “You cannot do that with a cocktail.”

Bispecific antibodies present challenges in downstream processing due to “shuffling.” To demonstrate this phenomenon, Varani says to imagine the antibodies having hands. In the case of a mAb, there are two hands. In the case of a bispecific or multispecific antibody, there are four or more hands. Shuffling occurs when the “left hand” of antibody 1, for example, binds with the left hand or the right hand of antibody 2. “This is a mess,” Varani asserts. “This complicates production purification, and you thus have to remove the forms that you do not want.”

“On COVID, for instance, I worked on bispecific [production]. It’s a human format. It’s identical to a monoclonal, but it is bispecific [in function]. Bispecific production yield was very low. Although the cost of production of bispecifics has gone down [significantly], there are still regulatory costs,” Varani says.

“Do you really have a bispecific? Are you producing a molecule that hits both its targets simultaneously? Does it remain a bispecific or does it open up once inside the body, how stable is it? These are all questions for which molecule characterization must be done,” Varani adds.

It is much more difficult to remove unwanted forms due to shuffling in bispecific antibody production compared with mAb production. Because shuffling must be avoided, product yield consequently tends to be lower, Varani says.

Although the purification process has since been improved, Varani notes that some trace amounts of unwanted bispecific antibody forms may be left behind. To that end, the more effective solution to minimizing shuffling and the formation of unwanted product is in the upstream, with molecular engineering, or rather, antibody engineering.

There are a number of solutions that can be derived through engineering. For example, one can engineer what’s known as “single chains” wherein a bispecific antibody can be forced into a single-chain format (rather than a folded molecule, the natural state of an antibody). “This is something very elegant,” Varani says. “You change the interface between heavy and light chains between the two hands [of the antibody] so that they are complementary to each other.”

Looking beyond bispecific antibodies, a new subcategory of antibodies is rising through the ranks: single variable domain on a heavy chain (VHH) antibodies, otherwise known as nanobodies (1), which are derived from camelids (e.g., llamas, alpacas, camels, etc.). One advantage that VHH antibodies hold is that they are single-chain antibodies, making them less structurally complex and smaller in size than human double-chain antibodies. Being single chain, VHH antibodies are not subject to shuffling, making their production much easier, according to Varani. Their small size and simpler structure also make them extremely stable.

In discussing the potential of VHH antibodies to act as immunotherapeutic agents, Varani says: “Being smaller, they have a much higher penetration in tumors. They get in much better than [conventional] antibodies. They can pass biological barriers as well, such as the blood-brain barrier.” Passing through the blood-brain barrier is a task that conventional antibodies cannot do. So, Varani explains, if conventional antibodies are injected into the blood, less than 1% of them will reach the brain, making them ineffective in treating neurological disorders, for instance. The supposition, then, is that VHH antibodies may have the ability to reach targets that conventional antibodies cannot reach.

However, with the pros come the cons. One major disadvantage that VHH antibodies have is that they have a much shorter half-life in vivo, Varani points out. Therefore, duration in the patient’s body may not be sufficient to confer full therapeutic benefit. “They have some advantages, but they also have some problems,” Varani states.

Yet, in the search for next-generation antibodies, VHH antibodies still hold strong potential. According to Varani, development work for VHH antibodies is currently booming after seeing flat activity prior to 2020, and clinical trial programs are in the pipeline. Importantly, the first VHH antibody product, Nanozora (anti-tumor necrosis factor alpha Nanobody), was approved in Japan in September 2022 for treating rheumatoid arthritis (2). Taisho Pharmaceutical developed Nanozora in Japan under a license agreement with Ablynx, a Sanofi company (2).

1. Bever C. S.; Dong J. X.; Vasylieva N.; et al. VHH Antibodies: Emerging Reagents for the Analysis of Environmental Chemicals. 

 (22), 5985–6002. DOI: 10.1007/s00216-016-9585-x
2. Taisho Pharmaceutical, Notification of Approval to Manufacture and Market Nanozora 30mg Syringes for S.C. Injection, a Therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis, in Japan Japan’s First Nanobody Therapeutic. Press Release, Sept. 26, 2022.


Volume 36, No. 6
June 2023
Pages: 15–17

When referring to this article, please cite it as Mirasol, F. Pushing the Barriers in Next-Gen Antibody Development. 

New fields are being explored to bring novel antibody candidates to the pipeline.

Pushing the Barriers in Next-Gen Antibody Development

While the biopharma industry is pushing the barriers with antibody development, it must also contend with contemporary challenges in bulk monoclonal antibody (mAb) manufacturing. The need for good manufacturing practice compliance for mAbs going forward is increasingly crucial.

To highlight some of the bottlenecks and solutions in bulk mAb manufacturing, 

® spoke with Lee Seung-sun, lead scientist for the Manufacturing Science and Technology team at Samsung Biologics.

 What specific aspects in bulk mAb manufacturing are the most challenging?

 As intensified process and continuous process are on the rise, many products these days have high cell number and titer. As a result, perfusion has been introduced to N-1 or N stage of cell culture process, and process development has involved using more feeds in high concentration. 

Read the related feature article, Pushing the Barriers in Next-Gen Antibody Development, in the June 1, 2023 

Especially with mass production, companies, including Samsung Biologics, have operated with more trains for cell culture than for purification as the cell culture process used be the bottleneck. However, with a significant increase in titer these days, the purification process is becoming the bottleneck. Such changes accelerate transition to continuous processing and an automation platform.

As market demands for various types of modalities such as antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) are increasing, the traditional workflow process of cell culture to purification to fill/finish cannot thoroughly respond to the rapidly changing market. Continuous investment and rapid adoption of new technologies are required.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chain, it has been hard to procure as much raw materials as required at the right time, and everyone is suffering from the prolonged situation. Especially for manufacturing of mAb drug substance, it is challenging to find the alternative to the raw materials that have been used, and, even if [alternatives are] found, it will take a considerable amount of time and effort to identify all risks related [to these alternatives] and introduce [them] to the actual manufacturing process.

 How much improvement in the overall mAb manufacturing process has resulted from the implementation of process analytical technology (PAT)?

 The use of various in-line sensors, including Raman, allows for more immediate responses to various issues during manufacturing, and better fine-tuning of the process itself compared to the past. People are getting more process knowledge as more data [are] acquired. However, to take full advantage of PAT, a system that can enable on-line and real-time use of information sensed by the in-line sensor needs to be established together, implying that an automated manufacturing facility that can be operated based on electronic batch records is required. This would be accompanied by large investment.

With the implementation of PAT, we are now in the process of transitioning from traditional process control to predictive process control, and the importance of data science has emerged in the biopharma industry accordingly. Establishment of a continuous process in an automated facility using PAT will enable manufacturing of high-quality mAb drug substance with much less time and cost, compared to the traditional manufacturing process. Samsung Biologics is in the process of digital transformation to keep up with these changes.

 What strategies have thus far been successful in improving process control over bulk mAb manufacturing?

 Time required for tech transfer and potential risks during engineering run and process performance qualification can be reduced by utilizing platform processes. Use of well-defined scale-down models and establishment of scale-down models with pilot scale can be alternatives to reducing risks for large-scale production. For commercialized products with a sufficient amount of historical data, data-driven improvement of process control can be done based on the historical data accumulated.

 What unmet needs still exist in bioprocessing (e.g., a technology, a piece of equipment, or an analytical requirement) that limit the ability to effectively control the mAb manufacturing process?

 Compared to other advanced manufacturing industries, the mAb manufacturing process is less automated and more labor intensive. Not only is it hard to predict and manage various issues that could potentially occur during the process, but it also takes significant amount of money, manpower, and time to find root causes of the issues and fix them.

 What other methods, or technology, or approaches can be used to further streamline the mAb manufacturing process (especially removing bottlenecking)?

 The mAb manufacturing process is in the process of eliminating bottlenecks through transformation into automated and continuous processes. The introduction of digital twins is expected to reduce time, manpower, and material spent on manufacturing in the near future.

When referring to this article, please cite it as Mirasol, F. Pulling Out All the Stops in mAb Manufacturing. 

Compliance with GMP standards remains an integral focus in bulk mAb manufacturing.

Pulling Out All the Stops in mAb Manufacturing

Evan Zynda, PhD, is senior scientist at Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Over the past decade, a large portion of the resources dedicated to scientific research has been focused on solving widespread unmet medical needs. This is particularly true within cancer, where many patients have limited treatment options. One of the most promising treatment approaches, which is equally as complex as cancer, is cell therapy.

Cell therapies are an emerging modality that are accelerating at breakneck speed. In fact, FDA created an advanced therapies “super office” specifically focused on increasing the volume of reviews for the growing pipeline of cell and gene therapies. Since inception, only a handful of cell therapies have received FDA approval, but there are more than 1200 cell and gene therapies active in clinical trials (1).

As an approved treatment option, cell therapies are relatively new. Novartis’ Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) was the first chimeric antigen T cell (CAR-T) therapy approved and came to market about five years ago in August 2017 (2). Now, there are seven FDA approved CAR-T drugs on the market, and while this is a major milestone in the history of cell therapy, these CAR-T drugs only cover a small percentage of global unmet medical needs.

Although cell therapy is a promising new modality, improvements in cost and efficacy are needed to unlock the treatment’s potential. The manufacturing process for early cell therapies is labor intensive, with multiple touchpoints. This often results in inconsistencies, contamination, and long throughput times, all of which contribute to subsequent safety concerns and failure modes, as well as the incredibly high costs that hold these therapies back from reaching wider patient populations and realizing their full potential.

Common recent strategies to overcome these hurdles in next-generation cell therapies involve the use of scaling up or out and working with alternative cell populations. Not surprisingly, these innovative workflows both introduce new challenges, such as maintaining performance at scale, and can exacerbate the existing ones if the process isn’t thoughtfully designed.

While it is true that most of the cell therapies in the market today were developed through academic manufacturing processes, the intrinsic challenges of cell therapy extend beyond commercial scaling.

The primary challenge is that peoples’ biologic makeup varies from individual to individual. Whereas many other recombinant protein-based therapies are manufactured using well-characterized cell lines derived from CHO cells that are predictable and enable consistent therapy manufacturing and, thus, consistent therapy performance, cell therapies are not created from well-characterized cell lines and the input material is different every time, yet the objective is still to deliver consistent output. When talking about autologous cell therapy (ACT) specifically, the patients’ cells are the input material into the therapy manufacturing process. This means that the quality of the donor cell material directly correlates to the quality of the output material, which is the therapy itself. Older patients and those that have been fighting challenging diseases often present with cells that are “exhausted,” which is to say they show less responsiveness to stimulation and, in turn, tend to generate weaker immune responses.

Efficacy is also a major challenge. In addition to concerns over the quality of the cellular input, the harsh conditions that immune cells can encounter in tumor microenvironments require that the cells be well equipped with “armoring and camouflage” to withstand the obstacles that prevent them from reaching their target, the tumor. When pursuing ACT, utilizing the patient’s limited number of high performing, qualitatively youthful cells to produce a therapy that is ineffective further limits the treatment options of patients who are already exploring final-resort treatments.

Overcoming these inherent challenges requires not only a considerable amount of expensive quality control, but it also requires adopting instrumentation and workflow processes that minimize the opportunity for failures that are costly—both in actual treatment expense as well as patient outcomes—and support efficiencies that address the critical cost and performance challenges.

With this in mind, significant progress has been made over the past five years to create innovations that accommodate closing, automating, and scaling the manufacturing process.

With the cell therapy market poised for rapid growth in the next decade, new technologies and evolutions in cell therapy manufacturing continue to support the commercialization of high-performing therapies and accelerate the development of the next class of cell therapy breakthroughs.

New innovations brought to market lower treatment costs and boost therapeutic performance by closing the cell therapy manufacturing workflow, thus minimizing manual touchpoints that lead to manufacturing failures.

Across every step of the cell therapy workflow—from collection and isolation, to activation, editing, expanding, and transporting—there are manual process or connection points that are susceptible to failure modes due to contamination or inconsistent practices.

Closing the workflow reduces manual interventions, decreasing the likelihood for human error or contamination to be introduced. When looking specifically at addressing this challenge, there are some steps in the cell therapy manufacturing process where technologies to remove human intervention do not exist. However, there are manual steps that are considered addressable, which characterizes process steps that have traditionally been conducted manually and can now be closed thanks to recent innovation. Cell isolation is one example of an addressable step. Cell isolation has been open and time consuming due to the collection and centrifugation steps, which were conducted manually and required significant repetition to produce a single therapy. Gene editing, whether transduction or transfection, is similar in that many steps have often been carried out by hand in the past. Other examples of steps that are still often open include sampling, though in-line monitoring and auto-sampling will solve this, media formulation, and quality control assays, which don’t affect the therapy itself but rather the treatment release timing and the cost in a major way.

Once the workflow is closed, automation can be introduced to further drive efficiency and help reduce costs. For cell isolation, technologies have been introduced that create an automated environment that consistently delivers greater than 86% isolation efficiency of target cells with 96% purity, all without impacting cell viability. In one specific case, high purity levels of >95% were achieved in a pre-clinical manufacturing workflow that initially struggled to reach cell purity levels higher than 40%. This same environment enabled a cell isolation protocol that can process up to 1 L volume (≥10 billion target cells) in approximately 70–100 minutes, which would historically take three to four hours on average (3).

Automation not only enhances efficiencies by reducing the need for highly skilled technicians to do repetitive tasks, but also increases cell therapy manufacturing success rates and reduces failures caused by contaminations introduced by human touchpoints. Examples where automation has been successfully implemented can be seen throughout these workflows. The most prominent example of this in cell therapy is in the expansion phase, specifically via the introduction of bioreactors, which have made it easy to manipulate the culture and eliminate a traditionally error-prone touchpoint, and manual interventions that have been necessary when using flasks, bags, and vessels. Bioreactors also enable physical connectivity between upstream and downstream steps involved in the process via liquid handling tools such as pumps, sensors, valves, and bubble traps. Cell processing, cell isolation, and genetic manipulation have also been plagued by a heavy amount of labor-intensive steps in the past, but more recent innovations have now made it possible to carry these steps out in a closed fashion as well. Other, less-universal examples of these automation-friendly innovations include solutions to automatically remove paramagnetic beads that are used for cell isolation and activation from the system, as well as the tools for auto-sampling and in-process monitoring.

The speed of manufacturing, which is critical for both therapy developers and patients, is also improved through automation. In studies, new instrumentation that automates the bead removal process delivered significant time improvement. In one case, the automated system accelerated the debeading process from two hours to 29 minutes, representing a 76% reduction, without impacting cell recovery (4) (

 Cell recovery time savings using an automated system (CTS DynaCellect, Thermo Fisher Scientific) are illustrated here. Process time was reduced from 120 minutes with the DynaMag system (Thermo Fisher Scientific) to 29 minutes with the DynaCellect system, representing a time savings of 91 minutes (4).

While these results are promising, it’s important to consider the approach to closing and automating a cell therapy manufacturing process. Unlike the production of mature modalities, such as monoclonal antibodies, the optimal workflow for the development of cell therapies has not yet been established. As therapy developers work toward closing their workflows and automating as many steps as possible, it’s becoming clear there are two distinct approaches. First, a more rigid approach that seeks to provide a walled off, all-in-one, single solution. The aim here is the create speed and scale by having fixed protocols for each step in the process. The second approach is more modular and focuses on delivering flexibility at each step within the workflow. The sentiment in this second approach rests on the notion that flexibility allows therapy developers to use protocols and instrumentation that best suit a specific workflow for a specific therapy and allows for more in-process adjustments to cater to donor variation. While both approaches are viable, given that scale of manufacturing is going up (allogeneic) and going down (autologous), a modular approach appears to best support a wider range of cell therapy manufacturers pursuing various workflows by giving them the ability to adapt and continue advancing their therapies, whereas the more rigid, singular approach limits their overall flexibility and ability to pivot when necessary.

In parallel to closing the cell therapy manufacturing workflow, tactics to simplify the manufacturing process continue to be explored. In 2022, Novartis showed that they could exclude the expansion process and dramatically simplify the process. By transferring the cell therapy drug to the patient for in-vivo cell expansion, the company shortened this process from 10–14 days down to as little as 24 hours (5).

While the need for closing cell therapy workflows and automating the manufacturing process is apparent, the path forward for advancing cell therapy development remains open for innovation. It is not expected that one approach for cell therapy manufacturing will become ubiquitous; there is a place for allogeneic and autologous, but the infrastructure to support both modes of manufacturing will continue to evolve. With allogeneic manufacturing, scaling the cultivation of donor cells will be immensely important to resolve the economic challenges and make this approach viable long term. For autologous, scaling out the manufacturing process, rather than scaling up the size of batches, is the key. This is where the centralized versus decentralized manufacturing infrastructure debate stems from.

Traditionally, centralized manufacturing of just about anything was the most efficient approach. However, when the product being produced is a biologic therapeutic, additional challenges are introduced. Transportation and logistics, including the regulations that come along with it, make an already complex treatment process even more convoluted. Because of this, the prospect of simplifying delivery through decentralized manufacturing is appealing. Technologies exist to be able to build autologous cell therapy manufacturing at a suitable scale at each of the major oncology institutions across the world. However, the technology for quality control processes is still lagging, which is hindering the buildout of decentralized cell therapy infrastructure.

No matter the manufacturing approach, greater connectivity and integration—both physical connection of instruments and digital connection for data transfer—will help support the next generation of cell therapy manufacturing. Connectivity will help mitigate the variation that is inherent in cell therapy manufacturing. While having a standard workflow is essential for efficiency and scaling, developing an extremely rigid cell therapy workflow can lead to failures due to the large donor-to-donor variations. A modular platform, with closed processes and integrated data sharing will support manufacturing optimization on the fly.

The pace of innovation within the cell therapy space has been awe inspiring. While there are more challenges to be overcome, momentum is already being translated into impact, and there are many reasons to remain optimistic about the modality’s potential in the future.

1. Mikulic, M. Number of Cell and Gene Therapy Clinical Trials in the Global Pipeline as of 2022, by Indication. 

, Nov. 23, 2022.
2. Novartis, Novartis Receives First Ever FDA Approval for a CAR-T Cell Therapy, Kymriah (CTL019), for Children and Young Adults with B-cell ALL that Is Refractory or Has Relapsed at Least Twice. Press Release, Aug. 30, 2017.
3. Thermo Fisher Scientific, 

Achieving High Purity with the CTS DynaCellect Magnetic Separation System

. Case Study report (2023).
4. Thermo Fisher Scientific, 

Streamlining Cell Therapy Manufacturing with Rapid and Reliable Bead Removal

. Case Study report (2023).
5. Penn Medicine, Penn Researchers Shorten Manufacturing for CAR T Cell Therapy. Press Release, March 29, 2022.


Volume 36, No. 6
June 2023
Pages: 26–29

When referring to this article, please cite it as Zynda, E. Addressing Cell Therapy Challenges Through a Modular, Closed, and Automated Manufacturing System. 

Scaling cell therapy production workflows requires the establishment of closed, automated steps.

Addressing Cell Therapy Challenges Through a Modular, Closed, and Automated Manufacturing System

Chanelle M/peopleimages.com - Stock.Adobe.com

A crucial step in achieving approval of a biosimilar is establishing analytical and clinical biosimilarity with the innovator biologic (i.e., reference product). Analytical biosimilarity studies therefore aim to demonstrate a highly similar profile taking into account variations in critical quality attributes (CQAs) of the biosimilar product. Such variations, however, must fall within a range set by the innovator.

Biosimilarity studies should consist of detailed comparative structural and functional characterizations, the data for which must be gathered using appropriate, validated analytical methods. These analytical methods must not only fingerprint the molecule in question but must also help reduce the cost (economic burden) that would otherwise be incurred in meeting regulatory requirements for extensive preclinical/clinical similarity data (1). In reducing cost at the biosimilarity study stage, it makes sense that the biosimilar product can thus be more affordable than its innovator.

Luckily for the biopharma industry, biosimilar manufacturing processes and the regulations associated with getting approval for them have become more well established in the past decade, as evidenced by the number of biosimilar drug approvals during that timeframe. It has also been helpful that biosimilarity studies that have been conducted (with an eye toward gaining regulatory approval) are being published more frequently and being made public, making access easier. As a result, some technical advancements that have been made in analytical sciences have found their way into techniques used for biosimilar assessment (1).

® delved into the challenges and advancements made in analytical methods for biosimilar characterization with Stephen Pagnotta, executive director and biosimilar commercial lead at Boehringer Ingelheim.

 What is meant by ‘implementation of orthogonal tools’, and why are orthogonal tools important for biosimilar studies?

 Orthogonal tools or techniques are laboratory methods used to characterize the structure of a molecule or protein. To build a complete physiochemical profile of a biotherapeutic, multiple orthogonal assessments are used to capture different aspects of a molecular structure. These techniques include, but are not limited to, peptide mapping, mass spectrometry, circular dichroism, and analytical ultracentrifugation.

Orthogonal tools are important for biosimilar studies because researchers must establish that the biosimilar is structurally like the reference product so that there is no clinically meaningful difference in terms of safety, efficacy, purity, and potency.

 What analytical advancements have been made that have boosted the ability to conduct biosimilar studies?

 Biosimilar development requires extensive analytical comparison of medicine structure and function to ensure biosimilarity to the reference product. Analytical method development is a procedure for reliable detection of analytes of interest. High-grade method development ensures that the method is suitable for full validation and high-quality analysis of medicines, metabolites, and biomarkers in biological matrices. Advances in analytical techniques have resulted in more rapid results, increased reproduction validation, and higher selectivity and specificity.

During research, the developed analytical methods are utilized to measure and define the required dosage, acceptable impurity, observed stability, and bioavailability of the medicine overall.

 Why is it so challenging to demonstrate biosimilarity with respect to CQA variations between the biosimilar product and its innovator?

Analytical characterization of biosimilars plays a crucial role in a successful path to regulatory approval.