Consortium to develop automated continuous purification

As biopharma moves to the business mainstream, the industry will increasingly need to find new ways to maintain competitiveness by ensuring affordability, quality, and delivery performance. Continuous processes have been proposed as a solution as they are scalable, offer higher productivity with reduced running times and materials usage, and require smaller footprint and less capital intense facilities. In addition, automated continuous bioprocesses minimise human intervention and thus the potential for errors.

This project brings together five leading biopharmaceutical companies with UK operations, process technology suppliers and CPI’s National Biologics Manufacturing Centre, part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, to develop an automated continuous biologics purification unit for more efficient manufacturing. The new unit will consist of integrated, multiple operations running concurrently. All the lab work will be completed at the facilities of CPI using equipment provided by Pall and using feedstock from the manufacturers in the consortium.

“This project will integrate all downstream processing operations into one unit so that a range of biologics are purified and formulated in hours, compared to many days. The value brought to process development and preclinical studies will also be transcribed to clinical manufacturing scenarios,” said Rob Noel, Business Development Manager EU and ASIA, Pall.

“As the biologics industry moves to drive the cost of complex therapies down and increase productivity, continuous processing, whilst effectively utilised in other manufacturing sectors, is relatively new to ours. With the expertise assembled within this consortium, we believe a significant contribution will be made to the way the industry manufactures biologics”, said Mark Bustard, Business Development Director – Biologics, CPI.