The pharmaceutical industry wastes about US$50 billion per year in inefficient manufacturing. It takes time and money to develop and produce life-saving biopharmaceutical medications, so anything that can make production systems more flexible, scalable and quicker to implement can save these valuable resources.
Bioprocessing applications include large- and small-molecule processes. While traditional medicines are compounded from molecules with fewer than 60 atoms, biopharmaceuticals such as insulin have molecules with hundreds of atoms; flu vaccines have more than 100,000. This complexity makes development and upstream and downstream production of biopharmaceuticals increasingly complex and costly.
The small window before each new product’s patent expires further adds to the challenge of developing new pharmaceutical and medical products. It can take five to seven years to build a new facility and begin full-scale production. If a drug maker can implement a single-use bioprocess facility in 12 to 18 months, that can save money and time, and ultimately get life-saving medicines to market faster.
Streamlining the deployment of systems, reducing islands of automation, and decreasing the time spent on gathering and cleaning data all can help biomanufacturing players accelerate their time to market.
One firm working toward those goals is Cytiva, a global provider of technologies and services for the life sciences industry. Based in Sweden with U.S. headquarters in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Cytiva’s job is to supply tools and services pharmaceutical manufacturers need to work better, faster and safer. The firm has more than 10,000 employees across 40 countries.
Supporting the Helpers
“Now more than ever as an industry, we must get smaller, faster and more cost-effective in the way we manufacture drugs, vaccines and therapeutics,” says Kevin Seaver, executive general manager, Automation and Digital at Cytiva. “Our aim is to help companies go from seven years down to three or four by doing much of the engineering and automation work upfront.”
