Ireland’s national bioprocessing centre seals $500K deal with GE Healthcare

The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), Ireland has agreed a joint research project with GE Healthcare Life Sciences to develop new, faster methods for carrying out quality control of antibody drugs. The partners are investing $500,000 in the first year of the project, which is planned to run for two years.

The goal of the collaboration is to develop new, robust and reproducible ways of analysing the biological activity of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.  Current industry standard techniques for research and manufacture often rely on cell-based assays, which can be non-quantitative, labour intensive and highly variable.  The collaboration will combine NIBRT’s expertise in glycobiology and novel analytical techniques with GE Healthcare’s capabilities in protein-protein interaction analysis.

Ian Marison, NIBRT Interim Director said the collaboration will allow NIBRT to apply its bioanalytical expertise to develop novel testing methods. The research will be carried out in conjunction with researchers from GE Healthcare’s laboratories in Uppsala, Sweden.

Lotta Ljungqvist, Head of Research and Development for the BioTechnologies business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences said the goal is to optimise every step of the discovery, development and biopharmaceutical manufacturing process for monoclonal antibodies. Antibodies currently have high manufacturing costs. The work aims to reduce cost of entry in antibody manufacturing, deliver higher yields of finished product and reduce time to market.

“This collaboration will help us to drive the development of new, biologically relevant and fully characterised binding assays for measuring antibody activity, a critical step in the design and manufacture of effective monoclonal antibody based therapies,” Ljungqvist said.

NIBRT was set up by the Irish government to be a centre of excellence for training and research in bioprocessing, in order to attract inward investment in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The Centre is run in collaboration by University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and the Institute of Technology in Sligo. This has helped to attract nine of the top ten global pharma companies to set up manufacturing in Ireland. Just last week Pfizer announced a further $200 million investment at its existing biologics manufacturing plant.