UK success stories

Eden Biodesign plugs biomanufacturing gap

This year sees the opening of the National Biomanufacturing Centre (NBC), a £24m bio-manufacturing facility built with UK government, European and regional funding and being run by Eden Biodesign.The facility will carry out the initial manufacture of biopharmaceuticals for use in trials, and hence speed up the transfer process from research to commercial exploitation. It will fill a gap in production capacity for clinical trials material and provide consultancy assistance to biotech start-ups.

The state-of-the-art facility in Liverpool will offer product development, clinical trial manufacturing and biomanufacturing training. Current areas of speciality are recombinant protein therapies, cell therapies, vaccines and tissue engineering.

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www.edenbiodesign.com

New dynamic extraction technique developed at Brunel

A group of quality engineers, with a background in producing high-precision instrumentation for NASA, have developed new scalable technology for the separation of materials used in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals (see picture). The technology employs counter current chromatography in a tube to achieve liquid-liquid extraction and has wide application in the large-scale purification of biologics, proteins and monoclonal antibodies.

The technique reduces the number of separation steps involved compared with conventional techniques and gives 100% sample recovery. It can handle crude extracts, including particulates, is inexpensive to run and is easy to scale up.

Already trialled on pharmaceutical materials, the new technique separated out an amount of material in hours that previously would have taken days. Dynamic Extraction is the name of the company formed to make the technology available to industry. A 'bioprocessing centre' built at Brunel University will open in April to give academia and industry the opportunity for further application research.

• ian.sutherland@brunel.ac.uk

Delta Biotechnology leads in recombinant proteins

Not all biotech success is US-based. Delta Biotechnology, founded in 1984 in Nottingham, UK, is a pioneer in the production of biopharmaceuticals and now a world-leader in the development of recombinant proteins.

Among its products are Recombumin, the world's first recombinant human albumin product approved by a major regulatory agency as a component of a licensed product, is made from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The US FDA approved Merck & Co's application to replace plasma-derived Human Serum Albumin with Delta's Recombumin in the manufacture of MMR II vaccine in August last year.

Another product, DeltaFerrin, is a yeast-derived recombinant human transferrin designed for cell culture applications. And Albucult is a yeast-derived recombinant human albumin solution designed specifically for cell culture applications. All these products are manufactured without the use of animal- or human-derived materials and are therefore free from risk of contaminating human or animal-derived viruses or prions.

• T +44 115 955 3355 www.deltabiotechnology.com

Lean manufacturing ideas at Boots

Ben Brudenell from the Boots Manufacturing division of the Boots Company, has helped to introduce lean manufacturing techniques to improve tablet production at the company's factory in Nottingham. In particular, the manufacturer has switched from using small plastic tubs for carrying the tablets between coating, printing and packing stages, to using FDA-accepted polyethylene (Matcon) IBCs. Previously, small tubs would be individually filled, labelled and loaded 50 to a pallet. At all further stages of coating, printing and packing, the small tubs had to be manually opened and fed to the required process machinery. Replacing the tubs with 1,000-litre IBCs has reduced manual handling dramatically. Security has also been improved as a result, as only one container now need to be labelled instead of 50, and labour costs have been reduced.

Having installed new IBC handling and unloading at the tablet feeding to printing stage and seen demonstrable efficiency benefits on the production of Nurofen, the company is now introducing the concept at other manufacturing stages such as compression. It plans to use IBC containers more widely and on other product lines, and is looking at automating the washing of the IBCs along with validation in order to allow multi-product use.

• www.boots-plc.com