What are the challenges encountered by therapy developers today preventing them from successful market reach?
To bring it in one simple word: Time! It is a race to get therapeutics to the market with multiple challenges throughout the various stages. There is of course always a link to a financial aspect with the growing costs going through clinical stages. Saving time anywhere in the process can make a huge difference. That can be by using novel technology, fast process development, and scale-up, manufacturing facility, etc. As Univercells Technologies, we are providing cutting-edge technologies, so it is just necessary to provide complementary services supporting our customers in each stage.
As an end-to-end partner, our aim is to unlock the market reach for our customers by giving them the opportunity to concentrate on their core therapy development business, while we support manufacturing success.
Felix Kasper, Head of Bioprocess & Field Services – Univercells Technologies
Why is Univercells Technologies launching its Integrated Services now? What is its purpose?
Cutting-edge technology requires cutting-edge services along with it. That starts from basics as ensuring comprehensive training and high-level qualification. But due to the novelty of our technologies, especially the NevoLine™ Upstream platform, we cannot stop there. We aim to capture all aspects from Modelization, Optimization, and Capitalization that gives added value to our customers and gets them faster to the market. Therefore, it makes sense to launch the services closely together with the commercialization of our technologies.
How have you defined your service offering? How comprehensive is it for your customers?
Our services aim to cover the full customer spectrum from early process development, technology selection and commercial manufacture deployment. Our Integrated Services are divided in three main groups: Optimize, Model and Capitalize.
Optimization starts with the initial technology transfer and provides a quick process optimization by ensuring scalability with straightforward scale-down modeling.
This is then used by the Modeling services, which covers all aspects from Process Mapping, Mass Balance to Platform configuration, and eventually Recipe conception to have your optimized process ready to run on the commercial-scale NevoLine™ Upstream platform. This is accompanied by Facility layout and Cost Modeling to take away headaches from our customers. And now it is time to Capitalize, meaning get the equipment into your facility including qualification up to PQ support as well as different training packages to ensure that your staff is 100% comfortable running your process on our solutions.
And all is rounded up by maintenance service agreements or “a la carte” services to ensure uptime of the equipment throughout its lifespan.
What is the experience and benefit of the services?
The key benefit of our services is alleviating gaps in our customers’ competencies by outsourcing them to us. That way costly delays are being avoided and on the contrary saving time by serving as an end-to-end partner. Our aim is to unlock the market reach for our customers by giving them the opportunity to concentrate on their core therapy development business, while we support manufacturing success.
We, therefore, have a team of experts in various specializations from Upstream and Downstream process development, cost modeling, process mapping to skilled trainers and field engineers. They are working hand in hand and are accompanied by Project Managers streamlining the communication flow with our customers.
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Integrated Services
About our expert
Felix Kasper is head of Bioprocess & Field Services at Univercells Technologies. His mission is to support the seamless adoption and establishment of the scale-X systems and the NevoLine Upstream platform as the source of bioprocess efficiency for viral production. Felix acquired more than 7 years of experience in supporting customers in technology adoption, process optimization and GMP implementation and more than 4 years in management and development of supporting teams for Bioprocess optimization, qualification, and maintenance. Felix earned his engineering degree at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologies (KIT) in Bioprocess engineering.