Continuous chromatography tech part of 'facility of the future,' says Novasep
For the full year ending December 31 2013, the France-headquartered firm reported an 8% growth in revenue, to €316m ($436m) across all businesses. However, for its biopharma business, Novasep recorded a 14% surge to €52.5m driven by sales of bioprocessing equipment and an increase in contracts for its biomanufacturing services.
One area the firm has seen a specific increased demand for is its downstream processing technologies, particularly its BioSC continuous chromatography solution for the purification of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), blood fractions and proteins.
“This technology, which provides a stepwise improvement in resin and buffer consumption, is gaining acceptance on the market place in particular for large volume applications,” Michel Spagnol, Novasep CEO told Biopharma-Reporter.com. “We believe it will be a central component of the so-called 'facility of the future' in the biopharma industry.”
Whilst he said Novasep worked with a broad range of companies – from emerging biotechs to big biopharma – it is “the current surge in financing opportunities in the biotech sector” that has led to “more of the emerging players coming [Novasep’s] way.”
Elsewhere in its downstream offerings, Spagnol told us the company’s AbSolute High Cap protein A media and its Sius fully disposable tangential flow filtration technology were “the most competitive on the market,” boosting growth further, whilst its high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems were topsellers last year.
ADCs
We also asked Spagnol about the firm’s antibody-drug conjugate (ADCs) services, following a €3m investment in 2012 at its Le Mans, France facility, and in light of heavy investment from other contract manufacturing organisations since (Catalent, ADC Bio, Carbogen Amcis to name three).
“Novasep has upstream and downstream biomanufacturing operations for producing monoclonal antibodies under cGMP conditions,” he said, adding it also had a twenty-year track record in cytotoxic API and payload production at Le Mans.
“We not only have the expertise in safely handling such active compounds but we also have a wide experience in synthesizing almost all chemical families of payloads, with enabling know-how and technology in purification, allowing us to reach very high yields and minimize production costs.”
He continued: “Additionally, we are among the few companies in the world mith more than 5 years of experience in conjugation at small scale that we are now ready to expand to meet market expectations.”
