Integrating single-use into existing facilities still a challenge, says ASI

At last week’s Interphex meeting in New York City, Biopharma-Reporter.com met up with bioprocessing technology manufacturer ASI Life Sciences to talk single-use, upstream and downstream manufacturing and the demand from industry.

“Demand is coming primarily from upstream manufacturing​,” Marketing Manager Amber Martin-Sherrick told us. However, “we’re seeing increasing demand downstream for purification needs. I would say it is a good healthy demand for all of the single-use manufacturers here [at the show].”​

We spoke to a number of makers of biosystems over the three days, and whilst stainless steel systems are far from obsolete​, biomanufacturers are fully embracing single-use systems. We therefore asked Martin-Sherrick what problems still exist within the industry.

“I don’t know if I would call it a problem, more a challenge, but integrating [single-use] into existing facilities,”​ she said. “If you’ve been using stainless in a facility for years, how are you going to integrate a single-use process into your existing process flow?​

“ASI works with its customers to find out how we can custom configure it, how we can use any current components that they are using, so we try and make it easy for our manufacturers to be able to integrate single-use but I would say the biggest challenge is the integration, the learning curve.”​

Amongst the single-use systems being showcased at this year’s show, ASI spoke to us about its Impulse mixing system which allows “easy and versatile”​ mixing and undocking within a stainless steel vessel itself.

Single-use products may help speed the process as far as cleaning and regulating goes, Martin-Sherrick said, but “they still need stainless steel vessels, or plastic vessels or something to hold it within, or to support it through a motor. Our single use systems, the way ASI does it, we’re able to custom fit it – either retrofit it or integrate it into a new process.”​