How to Accelerate Bioprocess Development With a Digital Solution

Bioprocessing is a critical part of bringing biopharmaceuticals and other biological products to market. Bioprocessing in life science R&D involves the design and development of processes that use a living organism, or component of an organism, to yield a specific product. Typically, this involves cells, but bioprocessing can also use organelles, viruses, enzymes, or entire organisms to create anything from biofuels to medicines.

Bioprocess Intensification

Bioprocessing is a dynamic and complex stage of the R&D lifecycle. In recent years, biopharmaceutical companies have been looking for ways to “intensify” their bioprocess development in order to rapidly optimize process steps, improve product yield, condense timelines, reduce costs, and ultimately get products to market faster.

However, bioprocess intensification can be challenging for a few reasons — namely, high materials cost, high labor cost, and increased need for experimentation. As discussed in The Cell Culture Dish and Future Science, three recent trends in the industry are also making it challenging for companies to intensify bioprocessing. First, as novel biological products, like DNA vaccines and microbial therapeutics, and advancements in biomanufacturing emerge, they make R&D study design more complicated. Second, necessary but strict safety and quality regulations have slowed the adoption of recent advancements in manufacturing efficiency, like digitalization and lab automation. And last, R&D organizations often face pressure to create a functional process that yields the desired product as soon as possible and tend to focus on optimizing those processes later, which can lead to inefficiencies early on.

To harness the power of bioprocessing and the potential gains of bioprocess intensification, biopharmaceutical companies need tools that provide a comprehensive, end-to-end view of development, generate actionable process insights, and ultimately aid continuous processing.

A Solution to Improve Bioprocess Development

In the face of increasing complexity in available constructs and manufacturing processes, companies working in bioprocess development should look for a software solution that is purpose-built to handle the complexity of biology and empowers scientists to track and manage experimental design. The ideal solution enables teams to collaborate and iterate on development processes rather than confine them to clunky, unidirectional workflow design. And while companies are optimizing processes to increase product yield, the solution should be validated in order to keep them compliant.

With a single solution that integrates with your entire R&D workflow, Benchling provides a platform approach to bioprocess development. By using Benchling, R&D organizations get a holistic view of end-to-end process development, improved collaboration across specialized bioprocess development teams, and actionable process intelligence — all within a validated environment. Our solution includes tools to manage cell line development, upstream and downstream process development, formulation, and analytical chemistry.

With Benchling, companies can improve bioprocess development efficiency while maintaining quality and consistency, enabling them to bring products to market faster.

Cue Biopharma Accelerates Bioprocessing

Cue Biopharma is one such company that leveraged Benchling’s bioprocess development solution in its transition from exclusively focusing on research to conducting in-house development. Cue Biopharma is creating a technology to engage and modulate targeted T cells, and their focus is on ensuring safety and reducing toxicity when engaging the immune system — areas that have traditionally eluded broadly-acting immunotherapies on the market. As they have matured into a clinical stage company, they’ve invested in Benchling’s data management system for standardized data capture and shared ontologies in order to foster collaboration and communication across research and development. This investment has helped Cue Biopharma overcome the challenges of maintaining the rigor and quality necessary to meet regulatory standards as they prepare products to go to market. Learn more about how Cue Biopharma is using Benchling to power their development process.

As the pace of the entire life sciences industry accelerates, it’s essential to ensure that bioprocess development does not create a bottleneck in a product’s journey to market. As a unified digital platform, Benchling integrates bioprocessing into the overall workflow of a company so that teams can easily execute operations and capture and share critical data at every stage of the R&D lifecycle.