Sartorius pledges to cut development times with upstream suite
The Franco-German company has bundled all its upstream bioprocessing products and services into a single platform - dubbed Connect Upstream - that it says can help biopharma companies go from concept to clinic in a little over a year.
It is pitching the system particularly at companies developing biosimilars as a means to reduce the time to market and cut productions costs, taking projects from cell line development through to 2,000-litre commercial manufacturing.
Biopharma companies often face significant challenges scaling up their processes so they are robust, comply with regulations and which deliver high titres that can keep cost of goods down, according to the company.
The new platform relies heavily on disposable technologies and also draws upon Sartorius Stedim's proprietary Cellca Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell expression system, Ambr cell-line selection system and 100-plus range of BioOutsource pre-qualified biosimilar assays.
The Cellca and BioOutsource products were acquired by the company last year and have helped drive a 22% increase in revenues at the company in the first half of the year.
Sartorius Stedim's growth is being driven by the increasing proportion of global drug market sales accounted for by biological products. This has nearly doubled over the last ten years, recently reaching just under a quarter of the total market, according to IMS Health data.
Time to clinic is particularly important, according to Miriam Monge, Sartorius Stedim's director of integrated solutions." Due to growing pipelines, efficiencies must be gained in process development [but] in the past cell line and process development has been slow and labour-intensive," she said.
Sartorius Stedim's system "now means that starting with a gene you can have a robust, high-titre cell line, upstream process and fully characterised product within 14 months."
