GE Healthcare's Life Sciences business and Emerson Process Management has announced a collaboration aimed at increasing productivity and improving efficiency in the production of biopharmaceuticals such as monoclonal antibodies and vaccines.

The two companies will collaborate to integrate Emerson's DeltaV distributed control system with GE Healthcare's enterprise offerings and start-to-finish technologies for the global biomanufacturing industry. The first DeltaV-driven GE Healthcare installation, which is expected to be complete before the end of the year, will be a FlexFactory, GE's integrated manufacturing platform based on single-use technologies.

Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are increasingly looking to automate production processes, driven by the industry need to increase efficiency and reduce costs. GE's start-to-finish portfolio of single-use bioprocessing technologies already allows manufacturers to reduce set-up times and increase manufacturing flexibility.

Emerson's DeltaV system, which uses predictive technologies to connect people, processes and production, enables remote monitoring and control from multiple locations across a company's network and is already widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. The DeltaV system will be offered as an automation control platform for GE's single-use bioprocessing offerings.

Mr Emmanuel Ligner, global commercial manager, BioProcess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, said, "Healthcare providers and the biopharmaceutical industry are facing enormous pressures. Emerson and GE share a vision that an integrated and automated approach to manufacturing has the potential to help drive improvements in production efficiency of these life-saving medicines. This collaboration with Emerson, combined with our depth and breadth of expertise in start-to-finish technologies for bioprocessing, promises to bring real benefits to our customers and to healthcare providers worldwide."

"We believe that the combination of Emerson's automation technologies and the GE FlexFactory will offer superior process performance, consistency of product, and reduced validation time," said Mr Jerry Brown, senior vice president of industry solutions for Emerson Process Management. "This collaboration will support more predictable processes that eliminate unnecessary work, which translates into a reduced time to market for our customers."