Year: 2021-22

Company: Boehringer Ingelheim

Liaison(s): Dominique Monteil, Brendan Lianoz

Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) is a privately-owned pharmaceutical company founded in 1885 by Albert Boehringer. BI is a research-driven pharmaceutical company with the aim of improving the health and quality of life in humans and animals by developing innovative treatments for diseases with no or few satisfactory existing treatments. They are a world-leader in biopharmaceutical contract manufacturing. Therefore, finding the most optimal Scale Down Models (SDMs) that match the large scale is helpful for their success in production of biopharmaceuticals. SDMs are a miniaturized representation of commercial scale bioreactors that are utilized to evaluate upstream process. These reactors are also used in process characterization studies, which at large-scale is not practical in most cases due to economic and time constraints. In addition to the aforementioned benefits, SDMs help to enhance the process understanding, investigating the process deviations, improve process robustness, and reducing the cost and time from R&D to commercialization of the therapeutic molecule. BI has engaged KGI’s TMP team to explore potential candidates for a benchtop bioreactor for their SDM. The team has explored commercially available benchtop bioreactors and developed a ranking strategy to finalize a list of potential candidates. The BI TMP team is looking into the chosen SDM candidates and performing characterization studies using CFD to determine their fit as SDMs for BI’s large scale bioreactors. The team is also conducting technoeconomic analyses in parallel to further support final business decisions.