The country's first two-day annual conference and exhibition on "Biotherapeutics: From process development to manufacturing" held in Hyderabad proved to be an interactive platform to share the latest developments in biotechnology and discussed factors affecting process development, manufacturing and research in biotherauptics. The event organized by the India BioGroup witnessed a large gathering of industry players, academicians and foreign delegates.

Dr Stephen F Gorfien, director, Invitrogen Corporation, GIBCO Cell Culture Systems, in his presentation on "Introduction and Optimization of cell culture systems", said, "Optimizing productivity can be facilitated by use of complete, integrated systems employing cells that have been pre-adapted to the appropriate regulatory-friendly basal medium, modular kit components and disposable bio-processing systems."

Arun Singhal, business area manager, Invitrogen-GIBCO, deliberating on the topic "Raw materials for optimizing, maximizing and being regulatory friendly", was of the opinion that proper selection of media and supplements not just increase the yield but also comply with regulatory requirements. He further emphasized that selection of raw materials is important for both technical and economical reasons besides elaborating on various formats and batch size of cell culture materials.

Highlighting the factors that need to be considered while preparing a facility for contract manufacturing of recombinant proteins, Raj Sachdev, manager, technical operations, Baxter BioScience, said, "Companies with no or low available capacity find such contract manufacturing organizations necessary. Such organizations need to focus on issues related to the production of multi-products in the same facility. Also they need to concentrate on several critical issues like preparing an existing facility for manufacturing a new product, issues related to facility or equipment modifications, regulatory requirements, etc."

While having manufacturing facility and undertaking production is one issue, compliance with GMP regulations is equally important.

The conference witnessed participation from foreign delegates including Saudi Arabia and the US.

Sunitha Natti, CyberMedia News