New Biotage Facility Tackles mRNA Vaccine Bottleneck
Biotage (Uppsala, Sweden) has announced an expansion of its production capacity of large-scale flash columns by 300% at a new production facility in Cardiff, UK. The expansion will allow Biotage to help pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturers to scale-up lipid production for COVID-19 vaccines.
“Our customers needed to manufacture their products on a significantly larger scale, and we were able to invest in an expansion of our existing production facilities to support their requirements. We were very pleased to be able to deliver this expansion in just over four months in order to meet the needs of present and potential new clients,” said Anders Wikström, EVP Operations of Biotage.
The availability of raw materials for mRNA vaccine production has been a major bottleneck as the lipids that were needed for new lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulations, which are used in mRNA vaccines, were not previously available on the scale needed to produce billions of doses of vaccine globally.
The newly opened production facility will enable Biotage to meet the increase in demand for this vital market segment.
For more information, please visit: www.biotage.com
AI and GenAI Applications to Help Optimize Purification and Yield of Antibodies From Plasma
October 31st 2024Deriving antibodies from plasma products involves several steps, typically starting from the collection of plasma and ending with the purification of the desired antibodies. These are: plasma collection; plasma pooling; fractionation; antibody purification; concentration and formulation; quality control; and packaging and storage. This process results in a purified antibody product that can be used for therapeutic purposes, diagnostic tests, or research. Each step is critical to ensure the safety, efficacy, and quality of the final product. Applications of AI/GenAI in many of these steps can significantly help in the optimization of purification and yield of the desired antibodies. Some specific use-cases are: selecting and optimizing plasma units for optimized plasma pooling; GenAI solution for enterprise search on internal knowledge portal; analysing and optimizing production batch profitability, inventory, yields; monitoring production batch key performance indicators for outlier identification; monitoring production equipment to predict maintenance events; and reducing quality control laboratory testing turnaround time.
