Pharmaceutical companies complexity

A second strategy that is more likely to succeed is to interfere with the process of activation of NF-kB by blocking the activation of the IKK complex or the degradation of IkBs. Pharmaceutical companies are investing considerable effort in the development of... 

The most complex automated systems are used almost exclusively by centralized HTS operations in large pharmaceutical companies and are referred to as ultra HTS (uHTS) platforms. They typically consist of the same four functional instruments, but have the capacity to process several hundred plates per extended workday. They often incorporate a modular design philosophy with multiple duplicate instruments for enhanced capacity that offer some functional redundancy. The mechanism for moving plates from one instrument module to another is often, but not always, a continuous track-way that resembles an industrial assembly line rather than the robotic arm typically used in a workcell system [5-8],... 

Biocatalysts Ltd. is an independent company that since 1980 has been devoted to the manufacture and sales enzymes. Since it is not part of a larger chemical, food ingredients or pharmaceutical company, instead of producing large volumes of commodity enzymes, it produces enzymes tailored to customer needs. Their services include working together with customers to industrialize their processes or to produce specific required enzymes. Usually, these customer sectors do not require single enzyme entities, but enzyme complexes where the ratios of each of the components are crucial to the efficacy of the whole enzyme-biocatalyst product and to the customer s process. Fermentation requirements for the manufacture of enzyme products are sub-contracted out. 

To get a better idea of the complexity of a real application scenario in these industries it makes sense to, once, exemplarily depict the planning processes in a typical production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API production). Most pharmaceutical companies are looking at planning scenarios in which several hundred individual resources or facilities have to be accounted for, with demands and orders for some thousand final products. The planning horizon is often set to 2-5 years. Next to single equipment, there are facility pools, with one pool consisting of several individual units. 

In recent years, developments in high-throughput screening inspired many pharmaceutical companies to focus and rely on combinatorial chemistry, especially massive parallel synthesis, to find new lead structures. The employed chemistry is often simple and the concept depends on sheer numbers for success. The main research areas were heterocyclic and peptide chemistry, and the resulting structures often lacked complexity and diversity, and most importantly the chance to utilize the evolutionary advantage of natural products with their privileged structures. 

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