BioPharm Services and IMRC Receive Knowledge Transfer Secondment Grant

The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded a Knowledge Transfer Secondment grant to BioPharm Services (Chesham, UK) and University College London’s Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) for Bioprocessing.

The main focus of the research is to create tools and methods needed for the rapid development of manufacturing processes for novel biological therapeutics. This grant extends and enhances the research by examining how to measure key engineering properties of biological materials used in bioprocessing by IMRC ultra scale-down methods and to connect these to mathematical models used in the biotech industry to predict process performance.

The research will provide the industry with proof-of-concept tools for making process decisions based on scientific evidence and offers the potential to increase process yields, efficiency, and costs. The research will examine, for a small subset of problems, how to achieve a more streamlined flow of experimental data into mathematical models, enabling more accurate manufacturing platform prediction. The platform used to make these predictions is a tool called BioSolve, a full process modeling platform developed by BioPharm Services. The challenge is to link the parameter values derived from such scale-down experimental work to full process sequence scenarios.

The results of the research will demonstrate the integration of ultra scale-down mimics such as scale-down centrifugation, process chromatography, and filtration into the BioSolve framework, bridging the gap between academia and industry.