Industry recognises continuous downstream tech at CPhI and Biotech Week

06-Oct-2016 - Last updated on 07-Dec-2023 at 10:50 GMT

Novasep picked up the CPhI award for bioprocessing at the Fairmont Rey Juan Carlos I, Barcelona, Spain

The conservatism of the biotech industry held back adoption of continuous manufacturing tech but this is now changing says Novasep, winner of the CPhI bioprocessing award.

In Barcelona on Tuesday night, French bio-services and technology firm Novasep walked away with the CPhI Worldwide excellence in bioprocessing for its chromatography platform BioSC Lab.

The system can be operated in batch, parallel batch or continuous mode, with a maximum of six columns connected and - used with the BioSC Predict software - allows the user to define the best parameters to be used, depending on the targeted process performances, according to Alain Lamproye, president of the firm’s Biopharma Business Unit.

“Any kind of biomolecules can be purified with BioSc Lab,” he told Biopharma-Reporter. “It is based on state-of-the-art low-pressure chromatography technology, and it can be used wherever this technology applies, in particular for the purification of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), blood fractions or any other recombinant proteins.”

Continuous downstream adoption

While CPhI captivated Europe this week, Biotech Week Boston kept the US bioprocessing world occupied and with another continuous downstream offering, Pall Life Science won a BPI 2016 award for its Cadence Acoustic Separator (CAS) system for the clarification of cell culture bioprocess fluids via acoustic wave separation technology.

Lamproye said that while most biomanufacturers are now on board with continuous processing technologies, adoption has been slow, especially in the downstream, with the main hurdle being “the conservatism of the biotech industry.”

However, he continued, attempts to overcome bottlenecks in the downstream have led to a change of mindset.

“As a consequence, industrial players have put a lot of effort into downstream technologies, more recently with regards to its implementation in a continuous production platform.”

Despite this, there are still a few challenges that remain in the space, Lamproye explained.

“Among these is the ability of a continuous process to contribute to viral clearance and maintaining sterility over a number of weeks. We are however very confident that those challenges will be resolved in the very near future.”