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Viral Vectors Vaccines, CA, 3-5 Nov. Roger will be presenting on Rapid Analysis of Adenoviruses & Michael will also be attending. To arrange a meeting please email Jo.
BioEurope, Germany, 17-19 Nov. To arrange a meeting please email Kassim.
We continue to support bioProcess UK as event sponsor of this year’s Annual Conference 2008, Brighton, 26-27 Nov. Derek, Philip, David and Kassim will be attending. Call by our stand or to arrange a meeting please email Jo.
Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing and Development Summit, NC, 8-9 Dec. Roger will be giving a presentation on ‘Production of Viral Products in a Multi-Product cGMP Environment’.
For a full list of events we will be attending please visit the events page of our website.
When I first started these reviews I had the idea that providing e–news readers with a restaurant or hotel review in a major city on the circuit of biotech conferences might actually be slightly useful. However, I’m rather suspicious that the principle outcome has been to serve as a prompt for mocking comments and emails about my self indulgent globe trotting gastronomy! If so – I’d better prepare for the deluge of sarcasm that’s going to flood my way after this one...
The visit to Whalers Restaurant in Exmouth, Western Australia was most memorable for the 1300 km drive to get there from Perth (see map).
A monotonously straight road through the bush with avoiding road–kill emu and kangaroo sometimes the only reason for turning the steering wheel for 30 minutes at a time. Stopping at the road house (service station) becomes a more important decision when you are trying to work out if you have enough fuel to last the 200 km to the next one!
It’s fair to say that Exmouth, in the Ningaloo Marine National Park, pop 2400, is not blessed with an over abundance of eateries. As most are fairly basic it was a surprise to find one as good as Whalers. It was licensed or you could choose to bring your own alcohol. Sea food was prominent – even though I couldn’t quite bring myself to choose the house special ‘Exmouth Bug’ (some kind of crustacean!), the soft shell crab and king prawn gnocchi were superb. Fantastic food at a fair price. When you are the only decent restaurant for many hundreds of miles, believe me – that’s not a given! You do need to book though.
The trip was only marred by an incident on the return journey. Can you believe I got a $150 fine for speeding? On a road where you can see anything else coming from at least 5 miles away, where we were lucky to see 5 other cars in an afternoon, and I managed to get nicked for doing 122 kmph in a 110 limit!!! Fantastic! All I can claim in my defence was that it wasn’t easy to work out it was a police car in the heat haze, and how was I to know they had forward facing cameras working in moving cars? I would like to take this opportunity to add a big ‘thank you’ to the warm hearted constabulary of Shark Bay who treated a tourist with two small children with such kindness and understanding and were prepared to press for a fine for such a marginal infraction. As they probably don’t get a lot of big crime action in the middle of nowhere, I’m pleased I was at least able to give them the satisfaction of stinging a ‘whinging Pom’ for 150 bucks and the inevitable high–fives around the station later. I probably made the local paper. I just tried to take what comfort I could from the fact that we stuffed them in the Olympic medal table.
Derek Ellison
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Welcome to the Autumn edition of our e–newsletter.
Next month marks the third anniversary of the official opening of our facility – how quickly the time has passed! We have worked a broad range of projects and during the summer we embarked on a recruitment campaign now employing 72 staff in total with further recruitment planned before the end of the year.
In spite of the instability in the world economy, the industry remains fairly buoyant as we continue to see opportunity for expansion, mergers & acquisitions.
This month, we see that Eli Lilly and Company acquired New York based biopharmaceutical company, ImClone Systems Inc. for $6.5 billion. The acquisition will create one of the leading oncology franchises in the biopharmaceutical industry, boosting Lilly’s product pipeline of biological oncology products.
Emergent BioSolutions Inc. has signed a new contract with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to supply 14.5 million more doses of its BioThrax® anthrax vaccine to HHS under a multiyear contract valued at between $364 million to $404 million. The additional doses will be included in the Strategic National Stockpile by the third quarter of 2009, after the completion of Emergent’s current $448 million contract with the agency.
Earlier this month, MediGene AG and three private investors founded Immunocore Ltd an independent company in Oxford, UK, to fully fund further development on the technology platform for monoclonal T–cell receptors (mTCR) of MediGene’s UK subsidiary MediGene Ltd. This spin–out is part of the continued focusing of the business.
Novartis has agreed to acquire Nektar Therapeutics’ pulmonary drug delivery business for $115m, with further takeovers possible in the foreseeable future. Novartis will gain 140 of Nektar’s staff, the product formulation and delivery expertise they provide and a broad device platform from the acquisition.
October has been a good month for the business, signing two major new contracts with internationally recognised companies in Europe and Asia for process development and cGMP production work for important recombinant biopharmaceutical products. We are also encouraged that a significant number of companies located in North America are recognizing Eden Biodesign’s expertise and experience.
We will be running a series of 2 day professional workshop courses throughout 2009 entitled ‘An Expert Guide to Biopharmaceutical Design, Development and Manufacture’ – all you need to know! The first course is planned for 27/28 January at Partnership for Learning, Liverpool. Further details will be available next month so please refer to the events page on our website.
Last month, Roger, Michael and Karolin attended the BioProcess International Conference in Anaheim, CA. We presented a poster on recent advances in viral purification. Click here to view the poster presentation. Congratulations also to those who won Beatles memorabilia in our exhibitor booth prize raffles. Pictured below is Karolin at the posterboard.
On 28 October we hosted Applikon Biotechnology’s Second Symposium which attracted over 60 guests from around the UK. The first day entitled ‘The application of process analytical technologies explained’ was held at the facility and amongst the speakers was Shivani Tyagi, Eden’s KTP associate (Strathclyde University) who presented on ‘Application of Near-Infra Red Spectroscopy to Industrial Fermentations’.
Finally, we are planning a series of webcasts and the first will take place on November 20 by Roger Lias, Eden’s Group Commercial Director. The topic is Accelerating Novel Vaccine Development from Bench to Clinic – to register please click here.
We have had a number of articles published recently – Our purification team leader, Andrew Clutterbuck, has a paper entitled ‘Integrating and Streamlining Biopharm Purification Processes’ which appeared in September’s issue of Innovations in Pharmaceutical Technology. Click here to view the article.
Whilst two of our senior upstream scientists, Jennifer Hallsall & Louise Almond, had their article entitled ‘Successful strategies for product optimization’ published in this month’s Pharmaceutical Technology Europe. Click here to view the article.
This newsletter is prepared by Eden Biodesign and comments and suggestions are most welcome.
Please address them to: Johanne Tabern (Tel: +44 (0)151 728 1750)
Eden Biodesign
National Biomanufacturing Centre, Estuary Banks
Estuary Commerce Park, Speke Road, Liverpool L24 8RB
www.edenbiodesign.com
If you do not wish to receive this newsletter in the future, please email Johanne to be removed from the mailing list.
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