Modernizing Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: From Batch to Continuous Production

The importance and value of continuous bioprocessing, both upstream and downstream has economic and sustainability advantages and due to the modular nature of continuous bioprocesses means that industry is able to adapt more rapidly to changing market demands. Continuous biopharmaceutical manufacturing in the context of other industries that have already successfully adopted continuous processing. Factor other than scientific ones, are the barriers to change from batch to continuous production. an excellent example of the manufacturing strategies of the steel industry in the 20th century, when this industrial sector incrementally switched from batch to continuous operations. biopharmaceutical industry has reached a stage that requires a change in the production paradigm. For a certain class of biopharmaceutical products upstream continuous manufacturing has always been applied: for example, unstable proteins that rapidly degrade in the culture broth. In order to obtain a high quality product, the residence time in the reactor must be minimized. This can only be achieved with continuous cultivation and preferably with perfusion reactors. a brief overview on the types of cell retention devices currently used in biopharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, this is a universal production platform that can be extended to other classes of products, such as antibodies, which are relatively stable molecules. continuous manufacturing is as productive and with a much smaller footprint of the manufacturing plant, avoiding multiple non-value added unit operations. In essence, the investment for a continuous plant is much smaller compared to a batch-operated one.