Year: 2021-22

Company: Catalent

Liaison(s): Victor Vinci, Thierry Nguyen, Kathleen Berth, Jingtao Zhang, Morgan Gillies

Catalent Pharma Solutions is one of the world’s largest contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMO), providing integrated technological solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. This allows Catalent’s clients to use pre-existing facilities and technology to generate product material, allowing clients to save both time and money while focusing on drug discovery and marketing. Catalent’s success is attributed to a strong diversification approach which has allowed them to build a robust portfolio of technology platforms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, messenger RNA (mRNA) in lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vaccine products were established as safe and effective methods of preventing the spread of the disease. This method of delivering nucleic acid in the human body has proven to be reliable and has thus sparked the interest of several companies to bring more mRNA-LNP based therapeutics to patients. Catalent wants to place itself at the helm of these transitions into mRNA-LNP medicines and the best way to do so is to offer a standardized platform approach that can be used by Catalent’s clients to more rapidly take their products from the lab scale to the production scale and deliver them to patients. The KGI Team has been working with several Catalent sites in the United States. The main tasks for the project are to create an up-to-date review of all available literature, including papers, books and patents, as well as obtaining equipment and raw material data from manufacturers. All of this knowledge will allow for the creation of a platform approach to mRNA-LNP products as well as the potential for licensing or partnership deals with companies holding relevant patents in a particular area of interest. The ultimate deliverable of the KGI Team is to compile and summarize these findings into review articles for publication.