Manufacturing

The BIOSTAT Cultibag RM is a disposable bioreactor that combines rocking motion mixing technology with Sartorius engineered control capabilities.

From the earliest days of the biotechnology industry, companies have grappled with the complexities of making innovative biopharmaceuticals on a large scale. Success in manufacturing begins with process science, since biotech production requires perfection in maintaining living organisms in a sterile environment under controlled physiological conditions. But unless companies can solve the challenge of planning for and managing manufacturing capacity, they will not be able to achieve the full potential of promising biotech products.

The US Food and Drug Administration's Nanotechnology Task Force (www.fda.gov/nanotechnology/ nano_tf.html) has released a report recommending the agency develop guidelines and take other steps to address the benefits and risks of products, including drugs and medical technology, that use nanotechnology.

For pandemic vaccine processing, single-use filter cartridges and membrane chromatography technologies could offer significant time- and cost-reduction advantages.

With the advent of high-resolution mass spectrometers and highly sensitive MS instruments, vaccine characterization has entered a new phase.

In animal studies, we have demonstrated that the dose of an injected H5N1 vaccine candidate can be significantly reduced by using a skin patch containing E. coli heat-labile enterotoxin (LT) applied over the injection site. LT-activated epidermal Langerhans cells migrate to the nearby draining lymph node and enhance the immune response to the injected antigen. A dry patch formulation has been optimized as a dose sparing strategy for pandemic flu and other vaccines. Iomai Corporation has developed a proprietary stabilizing formulation for the patch that allows use and storage at ambient temperature. The patch withstands temperature extremes during shipment, and is suitable for stockpiling.

For many cell-based vaccines, the precursor monocytes or CD34+ cells are cultured with cytokines to obtain dendritic cells, which are very potent antigen-presenting cells (APCs).

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.