Bioprocessing Summit Interview With Prof. Christoph Herwig

Prof. Christoph Herwig will be speaking at Keynotion’s upcoming Intelligent Bioprocessing Summit Amsterdam 2021. In his opening keynote presentation he will explore the topic on Integrating Digital Twins for Robust Control Strategies and Real Time Release.

Christoph is an experienced Professor with a demonstrated history of working on the link of science based development to scalable manufacturing of bioprocesses. He is a strong engineering professional skilled in Research and Development (R&D), Life Sciences, Bioprocessing, Validation, and GMP.

We spoke with Christoph about the bioprocessing matters behind the international healthcare innovation scenes, and his vision for the bioprocessing landscape in today’s world. Read the full interview below:

• • • • • • • • • • • • • What is your outlook for the future, and plans for 2022?

We see new technological enablers, being able to technologize personalized medicine and ATMPs. Those enablers include non-invasive sensors, such as image analysis for population analysis, and digital twins, which allow compensating for missing analysis. Those digital twins are a means to measure less. So we will see pharma 4.0 innovations entering new modalities and thereby allow for cost optimization, acceleration of process development and enhanced process robustness

• • • • • • • • • • • • • What is your view on the fast changing bioprocessing landscape in today’s world? 

We see a lot of single use solutions already implemented in biopharma, we mainly have to optimize this in view of less manual interactions, lower ecological footprint and more intelligence, which we can retrieve from the process. This will ultimately also be needed for the trend to continuous biomanufacturing, which is a clear economic business case for many biopharma products. For the latter, we not only need solutions to run single unit operations in a continuous mode, as available with SMB chromatography techniques since decades, but especially we need to have solutions to understand and control on the interactivity between the unit operations, Therefore we need PAT solutions, but also data science and multiple input and multiple output control strategies, based on digital twins.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • How rethinking bioprocessing can help us in Healthcare Innovation?

We need to have decentralized processing solutions, which can be implemented in personalized medicine products, which may still run in hospitals. Therefore we have to raise awareness that bioprocessing solutions will accelerate product discovery and increase product quality robustness by interdisciplinary projects. The bioprocess solutions shall include PAT, temporal resolved analysis of cultivation processes as well as systematic experimental design linked to enhanced data science

• • • • • • • • • • • • • What do you look forward to discussing at the Intelligent Bioprocessing Amsterdam 2021? What is the desired outcome of the event for you?

I am looking forward to a very interdisciplinary event! I am certain to meet thought leaders from industry in the field of development, CMC, manufacturing to see business cases and showstoppers, but also from academia, providing innovative advancements in bioprocessing. As an outcome, I would see a common understanding how we can project technological innovations and pharma 4.0 drivers to current and future business cases. Looking forward to have contacts to jointly work in targeted future projects!

Also check our upcoming events page.