New Center of Excellence Opens in China

New Center of Excellence in Shanghai, China

One definition describes a Center of Excellence as “a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area”. In Shanghai, we’ve built this new Center of Excellence to showcase our cutting-edge bioprocessing technologies. But the heart of the facility is the people working in it. The knowledge, experience and technical expertise of the team here will enable us to partner with biopharmaceutical manufacturers to speed new therapeutics to market, reduce cost of goods and ultimately, make people healthier.

Shanghai has developed into one of the leading global life science clusters and allows easy access to the other Chinese life science clusters in Beijing and Guangzhou, making it an ideal location to support the biotech industry in China and further afield in Asia. We work with biotech companies to decrease the time to market for new therapies, improve the security of the biotech and pharmaceutical supply chain, and lower the cost to develop and manufacture therapeutics.

Our global process development team has worked on many different process development projects for innovative gene therapy and continuous mAb. One example is a project for a therapy for diabetes using our iCELLis® bioreactor and a downstream process that includes depth filtration, ion exchange chromatography, tangential flow and sterile filtration, which we developed into an integrated, single-use manufacturing process for the three viral vectors required. The process scaled up production to 30 times its original size and reduced the labor required to produce the viral vectors by 80%.

We don’t just offer process development services - in 2018, our global team of biotech scientists performed over 1500 studies for customers to help with process development, filter studies and process troubleshooting. Our support for drug manufacturers means that all of the top 10 biotech and pharmaceutical companies use our products to make their therapeutics. 

We are pleased to expand and enhance the support we offer in China with the new Center of Excellence and look forward to working closely with local biotech companies. This new facility is designed to lead our customers through a process flow from upstream through downstream to formulation and filling, providing a framework for discussion on technology selection and process definition, as well as showcasing our latest biomanufacturing technology and training customers and Pall employees.  

The large team of scientists and engineers based in Shanghai will partner with our customers to develop integrated solutions that combine unit operations to provide a complete end-to-end system solution. They will also provide consultancy that can drive improvements in productivity and reduce development and production costs. We sincerely believe that our investment in this new Center of Excellence will unlock new opportunities for the future of the bioprocessing industry in Asia, and make a meaningful contribution to the accessibility to advanced therapies such as monoclonal antibodies and gene therapy in the region.