Gone are the days when people communicate by posting a letter and waiting for a response. Many people these days have given up home “land lines”; most people carry cell phones with them at all times and are easily reachable no matter where they are. Communication in the 21st Century has moved to instant post and response. Email, texts, and Twitter, technology has advanced with mobile devices and the internet, streamlining the ability for all of us to converse with each other at affordable cost.
As the medical field moves to personalized medicine, biologics are becoming essential tools in treatment plans. As a result, the technology for manufacturing biologics has to stay up to date to meet the demand. Manufacturing is adapting to include single use technologies and continuous processing. Modular facilities that are flexible and easy to manipulate are quickly becoming more common as the need for faster turnaround and response to market changes are required.
In a recent review article by Renaud Jacquemart and colleagues at Natrix Separations Inc., they illustrate the importance of optimizing biologics manufacturing with disposable technologies. (The article is entitled “A Single-use Strategy to Enable Manufacturing of Affordable Biologics.” Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2016 Jul 5; 14:309-18: doi: 10.1016/j.csbj.2016.06.007) The article lays out the advantages of an integrated facility design and in a stepwise fashion, presents strategies for modernizing manufacturing technology to enable more cost-efficient manufacturing. We highlight this article as an example of methods that are modernizing biologics manufacturing processes in the 21st century.
