Manufacturing

The recent growth in the vaccine market has led to renewed interest in using adherent human cell lines for vaccine production. Traditionally, small-scale adherent cell line production has been carried out in roller bottles or T-flasks. Over the past few years, however, a number of companies have found multi-tray disposable bioreactors an effective method for producing high-quality drug products using adherent cells. These disposable, expandable systems have also facilitated scale up from laboratory to clinical-scale.

Vaccines against strains originating from avian flu may achieve poor yields in egg-based systems. Consequently, both public and private interest in alternative systems is high.

Any endpoint considered appropriate to support approval, whether a surrogate or a clinical endpoint, must be supported by substantial evidence of effectiveness.

Like the egg-based vaccine production process, producing a vaccine under cGMP conditions using mammalian cells can be a lengthy process, taking a minimum of six to 12 months.

Adjuvant-caused vaccine reactions are one of the most important barriers to better acceptance of routine prophylactic vaccination.

Drug delivery technologies have the potential to enable drug candidates with poor pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical properties, both for macromolecule and traditional compounds. While there have been many success stories to date, the future offers even more promise. In this article, the author surveys the top ten areas in drug delivery looking forward.

The mounting threats of pandemic influenza, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases continue to be the focus of research programs and funding initiatives, not only within governmental agencies, but also universities, private research firms, and commercial manufacturing entities. With all of these efforts, however, the question of manufacturing capacity and the ability to respond to pandemic and emerging threats continues to be a major concern.

The US Pharmacopeia (Rockville, MD, USP, www.usp.org) recently announced that the implementation period for its USP­–NF general notices statement requiring all manufacturers to conform to recently revised residual solvent standards in General Chapter <467> has been extended from July 1, 2007 to July 1, 2008.

Process development and manufacturing for biopharmaceuticals are often disjointed activities. Disconnects among groups are aggravated by a lack of common terminology and poor data management practices. A UK biotech consortium has initiated a collaborative development effort to address data management issues. The proposed outcome is a data model, based on the ISA-88 Standard for Batch Control, to capture process and facility data throughout the product lifecycle. A data framework that follows the ISA-88 model can simplify process scale up and enable early views of project costs and facility fit.

Roche (Basel, Switzerland, www.roche.com) has opened its new biotechnology production center in Basel.

The FDA issued MedImmune, Inc. (Gaithersburg, MD, www.medimmune.com), a warning letter for violating the agency's manufacturing rules and held off approving the company's influenza vaccine for use in children younger than age five until the problems are resolved.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA, Rockville, MD, www.fda.gov) has issued final recommendations for increasing the supply of safe and effective influenza vaccines for both seasonal and pandemic use.

Intas Biopharmaceuticals Limited (IBPL, Gujarat, India, www.intasbiopharma.co.in) has become India's first dedicated biopharmaceutical company to receive certification from the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA, London, UK, www.emea.europa.eu) or an EU-GMP certification for its manufacturing facility at Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

The BioWelder and BioSealer from Sartorius (www.sartorius.com) are suitable for connecting or disconnecting thermoplastic tubing in biopharmaceutical manufacturing processes.

Today, most disposables are used for process development and clinical-scale manufacturing. Substantial growth in disposables usage may not occur until disposables are incorporated into the production of licensed products at commercial scale.

Discrete simulation allows the design teams to see every meaningful detail about equipment and materials flowing through the process.

Eden Biodesign (Liverpool, UK, www.edenbiodesign.com), SAFC (St. Louis, MO, www.sigmaaldrich.com/SAFC/Pharma), Midatech Group (Oxfordshire, OX, www.midatechgroup.com), Cellexus Systems (Cambridgeshire, UK, www.cellexusbiosystems.com), and BioConvergence LLC (Bloomington, IN, www.bioc.us) are sprucing up their product development and services with the construction of new manufacturing facilities.

Millipore Corporation's disposable mixer is designed to help companies mix pharmaceutical ingredients and prepare cell culture media.

Energy input is affected by rocking the chamber back and forth, generating a fluid movement in the cell culture and medium.

This flexible setup minimizes the number of purification process steps, buffers, and process components.

Membrane-based chromatography technologies sometimes offer advantages over resin-based technologies.

Fortunately for all of us, not everyone's head is in the sand.

The FDA's (Rockville, MD, www.fda.gov) first approval in the United States of a vaccine for humans against the H5N1 influenza virus marks an important step forward in protecting the public against a pandemic influenza outbreak.

Abbott (Abbott Park, IL, www.abbott.com) recently announced the official opening of its new biologics manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico to support the long-term supply of its leading biologic agent, HUMIRA (adalimumab), and other future biologics.