Aldevron Breakthrough Blog

Unspoken Themes

October 26, 2022 / by Yasser Kehail

Big topics not always on conference agendas

For events such as Biotech Week Boston, industry leaders, suppliers, regulatory agencies and academia come together to collaborate, present and partner on topics related to biotechnology, specifically therapeutics. And every year there is an unspoken theme you don’t see on the agenda, where speakers, attendees and sponsors discuss shared pain points, challenges and what the future could hold.

What was this year’s unspoken theme?
During Biotech Week, I would say the theme was about supply chains. I don’t mean constrained supply chains, but the opposite. While there are still raw material supply chain challenges (filters, single use consumables, resins), many are almost resolved. Suppliers are in the final stages of capacity expansion and validating new sites/equipment/methods, ready to take on orders.

As we look at the CDMO space, especially for cell and gene therapy service providers, there are cGMP manufacturing slots available, with a few major CDMOs at BWB stating they are taking on new projects starting immediately. This was unheard of prior to the pandemic, when companies had to wait between 12-18 months to reserve a manufacturing slot, and had to pay premiums to move up in line.

Now with recent capacity expansion across the industry, we’re seeing a new paradigm with accelerated GMP manufacturing since the capacity isn’t yet being used to its fullest extent.

What about therapeutic trends?
From the therapeutic application side, what I thought was different this year was the number of companies actively working on allogenic therapies. Five years ago, cell therapy was solely focused on autologous therapeutics. However, with logistical challenges and new cell editing technologies, it now appears allogenic has the upper hand, though it’s still in the preclinical and early phase one stages.

Please note that I’m not stating autologous therapeutics won’t be here in 5-10 years, it is just that with recent technology advancements, development challenges and growing costs for autologous approaches, allogenic applications are now becoming more attractive for use in development.

Digital again?
Big data, automation and AI have been buzzwords for nearly all bioprocess conferences, but this time we saw real data with application work based on these new concepts, such as:

Something I was reminded of because of this event was a quote from Harvard Business School’s Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovators Dilemma: “Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation.”

When patients are at the core of what we do as an industry, there is no better catalyst to motivate us, and I believe that’s why we are seeing these new product launches, innovative technologies, and massive financial investments in the space.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yasser Kehail

Yasser Kehail

Yasser Kehail leads the product management area for Aldevron’s mRNA business unit, where he is responsible for expanding RNA service offerings, building client partnerships, and ensuring successful scale up and tech transfer. Yasser started his career at Biogen, then worked at Cytiva managing the Upstream and Single Use Bioreactor portfolio. Yasser has a Masters in Bioprocessing from Northeastern University in Boston, and has been in the bioprocess industry for more than 13 years supporting different therapeutic modalities.