(100a) Engineering Global Biological Solutions

The past decades have seen biopharmaceuticals begin to dominate the drug development pathway and already we can see potent biologics bringing benefits to populations on a truly impressive scale. There remains much to do before we can claim however that the benefits of our burgeoning capabilities in the life sciences are fully translated into treatments, delivered globally. That challenge, of enabling the exquisite power of biologically-derived drugs and treatments to benefit world-wide populations, will require significant engineering innovation. This talk will look at some of these development and illustrate potential solutions driven by work from the Department of Biochemical Engineering at University College London (UCL); a pioneer in the field.

Challenges will be used to illustrate the nature of the advances made and of the path ahead. The first is the need to move rapidly from promising drug candidate to a robust and efficient process. Here UCL created the concept of ultra scale-down (USD) which can enable process insights to be gained with a few 10’s of mL of material.

Second is the need to make best decisions, be that at the level of technology choice or on a portfolio of drugs for development. So called Decisional Tools have been deployed to address such questions and to provide critical direction to research efforts as drugs move toward manufacture.

Finally we need, as engineers, to understand better the ways in which complete bioprocesses behave so that we can design and operate processes with confidence. A key example is the capacity to gain detailed insights into the processes of chromatographic performance loss. Here the ability to scrutinise at an individual bead level can create rich information for the biochemical engineer.

The talk will be supported with relevant industrial examples to demonstrate how our capacity to engineer global biological solutions continues to advance the translation of exciting life science into commercial outcomes.