BioSpring Selects GE Healthcare Life Sciences OligoProcess™

GE Healthcare Life Sciences and German oligonucleotide manufacturer BioSpring GmbH have announced that BioSpring has selected and installed GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ OligoProcess, a fully automated oligonucleotide synthesizer, as a core element of its production facility in Frankfurt.

Oligonucleotides are short sequences of DNA or RNA which can modify the expression of genes involved in disease pathways, leading to considerable interest in their potential as next-generation therapeutic agents for treating a wide variety of diseases such as cancer, asthma and diabetes.

GE Healthcare’s OligoProcess is a customizable platform for the synthesis of therapeutic oligonucleotides, designed to allow manufacturing scale-up from early stage clinical research to post-marketing manufacture on the same system. This single system approach greatly simplifies manufacturing process development, offering the potential to save both time and money as well as reduce project risk.

Dr. Sylvia Wojczewski, CEO of BioSpring, said: “We are very excited to be the first in the world to have this new technology platform in our facility because it will enable us to improve the output and flexibility of our manufacturing capabilities. The ability to go from pilot scale to full manufacturing scale on the same system, which OligoProcess delivers, is a key requirement for us in serving our customers more effectively and efficiently than before.”

Emmanuel Ligner, Global Commercial Manager, BioProcess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, said: “We are seeing a real diversification in the types of molecules that the industry is developing for therapeutic use, to include fragment antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, vaccines and oligonucleotides. Our driver is to develop the technologies, tools and services which help the industry to manufacture a quality product in the most cost-effective way possible. With the help of our technology, BioSpring has enhanced its offering to companies needing manufacturing-scale production of oligonucleotides for therapeutic use.”

GE Healthcare offers a wide range of start-to-finish technologies and services for the discovery and manufacture of innovative new medicines and vaccines. In March 2014 the company acquired Thermo Fisher’s HyClone™ cell culture media and sera business and in 2012 the company launched KUBio™, an off-the-shelf modular factory for the manufacture of monoclonal antibodies. BioSpring has a number of collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies.

On Wednesday 14th May 2014, GE Healthcare and BioSpring will present data on the OligoProcess oligonucleotide manufacturing system at the 16th Annual TIDES Conference, Providence, RI, USA.