Building a case for Biotech? Structured critical thinking is key
Britest Senior Innovation Specialist Rob Peeling argues that anyone seeking to realise the benefits of innovative bioprocesses at industrial scale needs to holistically probe their process understanding, spot knowledge gaps and develop action plans that will result in both reliable technology at scale and a robust evidence base for business decision making.
Britest is a not-for-profit membership-based organisation and consultancy which champions effective whole process design and open innovation throughout the chemical, biochemical and related process industries. Britest’s specialist technical facilitators help multidisciplinary development and manufacturing teams within companies, across supply chains, and in collaborative projects turn their working knowledge into impactful process understanding capable of driving innovation. Visually rich tools for information capture and structuring enable our clients to assimilate and communicate insight critical to product and process development, successful problem solving, and process improvement. The Britest approach has successfully delivered innovative solutions to key process and manufacturing challenges since 2001.
To show what that looks like in practice, here are some brief examples. Britest were able to support Conductive Organics, a spin-out from the University of Strathclyde, in a rapid scale-up study for taking a key chemical component from gram to kilogram scale, and to estimate the product cost for different process options. With more complete awareness of scale-up challenges, a prioritised lab to pilot action plan was generated, along with a model of the scale-up process costs and timeline to aid business planning.
“Our team found the Britest experience to be invaluable. The outputs are helping us prioritise the most essential alterations to our synthesis to enable a successful scale-up.”
More established business can also benefit from structured critical thinking however. Biogen’s position as a pioneer in biotechnology based treatments for serious neurological, autoimmune and rare diseases is built upon globally distributed products manufactured at multiple sites. Britest facilitated a structured review of Biogen’s manufacturing operations with an end-to-end view of the entire manufacturing process in order to guarantee product quality and robustness.
Finally, in the TKI project "business models for flexible modular production" Britest considered approaches to identify and evaluate business cases for investment in innovative technology. This led to a structured methodology for more consistent and auditable facilitated decision making. The approach, described in this article in The Chemical Engineer is particularly geared towards helping a business better understand the uncertainties and risks during the early stages before formal project management techniques are typically applied.
Britest would be delighted to discuss any opportunities to support and strengthen the development of business cases for implementing innovative technology in Industrial Biotechnology, and techno-economic justification of new technology over conventional process concepts.
More at www.britest.co.uk
“End-to-End review lets us learn from, and challenge, each other through scientific review and discussion. The result is huge learning and deeper scientific understanding, allowing teams to put the right focus on life cycle management activities and process robustness throughout the product life cycle.”