LIVE FROM CPhI 2011: Innovation Awards winners announced
Hendrik Baumann, chairman of the judging panel reveals the winners
Glycotope was awarded Gold in this year's Innovation Awards last night (Tuesday) at CPhI in Frankfurt.
The firm's GlycoExpress platform technology optimises the glycosylation of antibodies and other glycosylated biotherapeutics. Other production methods give either no or non-human glycosylation, but these are based on human cell lines developed for screening the optimum glycosylation pattern and for producing glyco-optimised biotherapeutics, and their production features allow a cost-effective, stable and reproducible process to be designed.
The Silver award was presented to Acuros, which has developed a disposable device for the continuous delivery of small volume parenteral drugs, in doses ranging from microlitres to millilitres per hour. Driven by an osmotic actuation, with no battery, electronics or mechanical components, the self-contained device uses standard primary packaging components, and gives a precise and stable flow rate, with selectable delivery rates.
Johnson Matthey Catalysts took the Bronze award for its Colour-Tag-Protein technology, which has been developed as a marker for protein expression. These yellow fluorescent tags allow protein expression to be detected easily in crude cell extracts, speeding up the development of new enzyme catalysts. Unlike the commonly used green fluorescent protein, they can be used in anaerobic conditions as well as aerobic systems.
The other finalists for this year’s CPhI Innovation Awards, hosted in conjunction with Manufacturing Chemist, included 3M Drug Delivery Systems, which has developed the Integrated Dose by Dose counter, which allows patients to monitor how many doses they have left in their metered dose inhaler so they can plan when they need a new one. Compatible with existing packaging lines, the displacement drive mechanism operates just ahead of the spray release, making undercounting impossible.
A multilayer plastic vial from Gerresheimer also made the last six. This vial is made from layers of cyclic olefin polymer, which is compatible with biopharmaceutical drugs, and polyamide, which confers strength and acts as a barrier to air, bacteria and other contaminants. Stronger than glass and more impermeable than other plastics, the vials can be used with standard rubber closures and seals.
PANATecs’ P-Check technology enables the detection of protease contamination in raw materials. Proteases can significantly affect the performance of enzyme immunoassays, and this new method uses fluorescence resonance energy transfer technology to detect them. The labelled substrate peptides contain sufficient points of attack to be able to detect most proteases, both known and unknown.
Hendrik Baumann, chairman of the awards jury, also announced the winner of the CPhI Sustainability Award at last night's presentations. Solvias took the accolade, with Omnichem and Baxter as runners-up.
