Improving production processes

Unlocking the potential of new cancer therapies
Processes for the production and manufacture of cancer drugs are evolving rapidly, driven by the advent of novel cancer therapies and drug modalities. Several trends are affecting the traditional drug production process, creating new challenges to its automation. Sensitive and complex new biological drugs and vaccines (also called biologics) are coming into the market, driving the subsequent need for sophisticated drug delivery systems, the growth of personalized therapies with batches as small as one, and generic manufacturing of biosimilars that need to be standardized, all of which contribute to increasing complexity in the production process.

Enabling biopharma drug production with stringent quality control solutions
One way that Tecan helps address these challenges is by empowering biopharma drug production through more stringent quality control (QC) solutions that have enabled global pharmaceutical companies to perform small-scale purification of early drug candidates and QC assays in the bioprocessing workflow. We are also the automation partner of choice for a leading European analytical laboratory chain, helping them to implement automation capabilities for their cytotoxicity kit, which is used in QC for cancer drug production. We are taking on the challenge of automating small-scale production and enabling rapid scale-up for large-scale drug production. Before scaling up production in a large fermenter, for example for mAb production, a pharmaceutical company can test all the different parameters in the column on a small scale to optimize them before scaling-up, which is expensive.

Tecan leads the charge in efficient cancer drug production
Another of our partners in the Partnering Business has adapted Tecan’s multimode readers to play a critical role in the production of injectable drugs. The instrument supports pyrogen and endotoxin testing of raw materials, in-process samples, and manufactured products, combining absorbance and fluorescence technology in a single, user-friendly instrument. This OEM product speeds up the production workflow while meeting regulatory requirements for injectable drugs and implantable medical products, including support for the new modalities used in modern vaccines and biologics. A complete automation solution for rapid endotoxin testing for pharmaceutical quality control is also available1. Although the entire cancer drug production process is ever more complex, the industry is rapidly responding. Tecan’s solutions can help producers by scaling up critical steps, making the overall production process more efficient, more reliable and less costly.

1. partnering.tecan.com/customer-success-story/lonza-pyrotec-pro