Improved downstream operation through formulation innovation

Making a biologic drug—like an antibody or enzyme—is a delicate, multi-step process, and the liquid buffers used to keep the protein stable during purification often fail, causing the drug to degrade and reducing the final yield. This project tackles a hidden bottleneck in manufacturing: the standard chemical solutions used in downstream processing (DSP) are not optimised for protein stability. Currently, drug makers accept significant product loss during these steps because no better buffer exists. The team—combining formulation chemists from Arecor with process engineers from Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies and CPI—will design a new platform of formulations that keep proteins intact through the most damaging stages of purification. If successful, these improved formulations could cut production costs for all biologic medicines, lowering prices for healthcare providers. They may also make it possible to manufacture biotherapeutics that are currently too unstable to produce at scale. This is not fundamental science; it is applied process innovation aimed at a concrete industrial problem. The result would be a quieter, less visible improvement to the pharmaceutical supply chain—one that patients never see but that could make expensive treatments more affordable and more widely available.