At Biotech Week Boston Brian Caine Publisher at BioPorcess International, sat down with GE Healthcare’s Business Leader (Chromatography Resins) Jonathan Royce, to discuss the future of monoclonal antibodies and monoclonal antibody purification. Watch the full interview or read the key takeaways from the discussion.
Market trends impacting monoclonal antibodies
Jonathan Royce: 'Monoclonal Antibodies have grown from a sort of fledgling part of the industry to now being more than 50% of the biotech market. There’s a huge pipeline of antibodies still to be commercialized; if you look at many market reports they expect the market is going to grow to an the order of around $125 billion by 2020. It’s still growing in the double digits but…there are a lot of emerging therapies.
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Even within the antibody space there are a lot of emerging technologies coming, so you see a lot more focus on things like antibody fragments and bispecific antibodies starting to populate that pipeline. That’s going to present an increased amount of diversity, even within the antibody space as we move forward into the next five or ten years. But, we think that the market, as a whole, is strong. There’s a lot of interest, both from manufacturers and from clinicians, and there’s a lot of room to keep improving technology in that space for future manufacturability.'
Current purification challenges facing biopharmaceutical companies
JR: 'I think in the antibody space, you mention the titers, that has created a situation where downstream purification is challenged. There’s been such an incredible increase in titers over the last, basically, two decades. We’ve seen more than a hundred-fold increase in the productivity of cells, and that means that downstream purification technology has to really continue to evolve and meet those productivity gains so that doesn’t become weight limiting step in processes.'
The role of Protein A
JR: 'Protein A, I always say, really is the holy grail of antibody purification. People look for alternatives to protein A but it is a molecule that's developed over millions of years of evolution to protect the bacterial cell against our immune systems. It has a fantastic specificity for antibodies that's very hard to match with anything that we would engineer as an alternative, and it's really enabled the market to move to a state where an antibody can go from drug discovery; essentially into manufacturing in short periods of time.'
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