Recovery and purification of biosynthetic products: Downstream processing for the 21st century 2013

The growing interest in biotechnology development and the high demand for biopharmaceuticals have contributed to the growth of the global biopharmaceutical market, which now comprises over 200 prodcuts. This market has reached $106 billion in 2009 and is forecasted to grow with a CAGR of 11.2% by 2016.                         

The main challenges of the biopharmaceutical industry now are to increase the efficiency and reduce the costs of the manufacturing process, with respect to the protein recovery, purity and efficacy. Therefore, new strategies are being implemented for the upstream and downstream processing. In the upstream, genetic engineering and glycoengineering approaches, as well as single-use bioreactors are being developed and applied. However, as culture yields are continuously increasing, the bottleneck in the manufacturing process has shifted to the dowstream processing, which accounts for ~ 80% of the total production cost. Many aspects are being considered for improving economics in downstream processing, such as simplification of the chromatographic purification processes, application of membrane technology, crystallization and precipitation.                                   

This meeting will focus on the advances, innovation and challenges in the area of downstream processing of biopharmaceuticals.