News

pAVEway™ makes its mark as Avecia makes £1M investment to meet demand.

Date: 02/10/2007

Demand for pAVEway™, the new cost and time-reducing technology from Avecia Biologics, has seen the company invest more than £1million to increase capacity.

Avecia unveiled its pAVEway™ technology in May this year. pAVEway™ has been developed to help speed up the process from research to production of biopharmaceuticals, with reduction in long-term manufacturing cost.

Building upon demand for the technology, Avecia is developing a new suite of state-of-the-art biologics laboratories at its Tees Valley, UK, headquarters, which will allow it to take on over 20 per cent more research and development work than was previously the case.

The new technology enables class-leading (>10g/L) microbial production of a wide range of therapeutically useful proteins (vaccines, cytokines, growth factors, antibody fragments, etc).

Achieving high levels of active protein during fermentation is often a bottleneck in the development of an efficient production process. The choice of expression system, host strain and fermentation conditions has a profound effect on the overall quantity and quality of protein produced and thus has a major impact on the success of scale-up from research and development to large scale cGMP manufacturing, and ultimately on the cost of goods.

Avecia’s scientists used their expertise and understanding of state-of-the-art microbial systems to design and build processes to optimise the fermentation processes. These systems are combined in the pAVEway™ platform.

A further £100,000 has been spent on a similar re-fit project to allow Avecia to offer an expanded range of analytical testing studies for clients for the first time. This includes essential work understanding biological product stability.

Avecia is currently recruiting up to 15 graduate and PhD-level people as part of the research and development expansion, while the stability testing will see a total of six new people employed by the end of the year.

Dr Mark Carver, chief scientific officer at Avecia Biologics said: “The investment in expanding our research and development capabilities is in direct response to an increase in the number of business opportunities which are arising and the interest we are seeing in the pAVEway™ technology.

“Combined with the investment being made in stability testing, this represents a major commitment to expanding our global operations based in the Tees Valley.”

Whilst offering major advances in treatment, the new generation of biologic medicines are relatively sensitive to storage conditions and degradation. Therefore building a deep understanding of the storage stability of new biologics is a vital activity, requiring extensive analytical work or products and tracking any changes over long periods of time under tightly controlled conditions. The investment in stability testing will mean that Avecia can offer this
important service for the first time, complementing its portfolio of services.

Through its work in process development and manufacturing, Avecia builds a strong understanding of customers products and the application of this knowledge will allow an unparalleled ability to help in the design and execution of stability studies necessary to support the registration of products.

Dr Sean Doherty, stability group manager, said: “Virtually every Avecia manufacturing customer requests us to perform stability studies. Being able to offer these tests in-house, rather than transfer them to another company, means Avecia can make a more complete offering, saving our clients time and money.

“This is an exciting first step in a wider strategic plan to build a set of non-manufacturing related analytical services that will greatly benefit customers.”

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