Biopharmaceuticals/biologics

An overview of the general principles of filtration having specific appHcation to bacterial and viral removal is given herein. The emphasis is on ensuring that the sterility and/or safety of biologicals and biopharmaceuticals be maintained. 

Human blood plasma contains over 700 different proteins (qv) (1). Some of these are used in the treatment of illness and injury and form a set of pharmaceutical products that have become essential to modem medicine (Table 1). Preparation of these products is commonly referred to as blood plasma fractionation, an activity often regarded as a branch of medical technology, but which is actually a process industry engaged in the manufacture of speciaUst biopharmaceutical products derived from a natural biological feedstock (see Pharmaceuticals). 

Purification of biopharmaceuticals often involves the removal of materials with physical characteristics very similar to the desired product, such as failure sequences from DNA synthesis or misfolded proteins from bacterial fermentations. The contaminants, however, may have biological characteristics very different from the desired product, including different antigenicities, bioactivities, and specificities. There are even systems in which the... 

The initial driving force behind the development of HPCE came from the need of better and faster separations for biologically important molecules used in biotechnology research and in the biopharmaceutical industry. Traditional electrophoresis is an established method in life sciences however,... 

Drug instability as delivered from conventional formulation Solubility Biopharmaceutical Low absorption High membrane binding Biological instability Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic Short half-life... 

Fischer, R., Stoger, E., Schillberg, S. etal. (2004) Plant-based production of biopharmaceuticals. Current Opinion in Plant Biology, 1 (2), 152-158. 

Avecia is a biotechnology company directed to the development and manufacturing of biotechnology based medicines. It is structurally organized in two business units, namely Biologies and DNA Medicines. Its capabilities comprise process development, scale-up, and manufacture of microbial-derived biopharmaceuticals and oligonucleotides. 

In this review, we focus on the use of plant tissue culture to produce foreign proteins that have direct commercial or medical applications. The development of large-scale plant tissue culture systems for the production of biopharmaceutical proteins requires efficient, high-level expression of stable, biologically active products. To minimize the cost of protein recovery and purification, it is preferable that the expression system releases the product in a form that can be harvested from the culture medium. In addition, the relevant bioprocessing issues associated with bioreactor culture of plant cells and tissues must be addressed. 

After the approval of the first product, recombinant insulin, in 1982, progress in the development of new recombinant protein pharmaceuticals was slow ([10], Fig. 17.1). The number of biotechnology-derived drugs and vaccines approved by the US Food and Dmg Administration (FDA) has increased significantly only since 1995. More recently, sales of biologies have skyrocketed, e.g. from 900 million in 1999 to an estimated 3.5 billion in 2001 for monoclonal antibodies [11]. The annual global market for biopharmaceuticals is estimated to have increased from 12 billion US to 30 billion US in 2003 [12]. 500 candidate biopharmaceuticals are undergoing clinical evaluation and over one hundred protein-based therapeutics are in the... 

Terms such as biologic , biopharmaceutical and products of pharmaceutical biotechnology or biotechnology medicines have now become an accepted part of the pharmaceutical literature. However, these terms are sometimes used interchangeably and can mean different things to different people. 

Many polypeptides undergo covalent modification after (or sometimes during) their ribosomal assembly. The most commonly observed such PTMs are listed in Table 2.7. Such modifications generally influence either the biological activity or the structural stability of the polypeptide. The majority of therapeutic proteins bear some form of PTM. Although glycosylation represents the most common such modification, additional PTMs important in a biopharmaceutical context include carboxylation, hydroxylation, sulfation and amidation these PTMs are now considered further. 

The biopharmaceutical sector is largely based upon the application of techniques of molecular biology and genetic engineering for the manipulation and production of therapeutic macromolecules. The majority of approved biopharmaceuticals (described from Chapter 8 onwards) are proteins produced in engineered cell lines by recombinant means. Examples include the production of insulin in recombinant E. coli and recombinant S. cerevisiae, as well as the production of EPO in an engineered (Chinese hamster ovary) animal cell line. 

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