Industry Overview

The global single-use processing systems market is estimated to grow to $5.35 billion by 2021. The widespread implementation of single-use systems is making product manufacturing considerably more cost efficient. However, there is a need for faster processes which means that industry players are pressured to optimise their biomanufacturing strategies in order to keep up with the growing biopharma market.

Pharma IQ created an industry report based upon on feedback gathered from over 100 biopharma experts and will cover several key industry topics including optimising biomanufacturing processes, sustainability and environmental impact, product documentation, sterility assurance and manufacturing flexibility. Here we will represent some of the key findings from the report:

Almost 50% of respondents believe that lack of viable technology is hindering the implementation of continuous manufacturing 93% of respondents believe that all companies will soon have to factor in the environmental impact of disposable products

Over half of respondents believe that the documentation provided for disposable products does not cover all the information needed.

Only 41% of respondents believe that all the necessary information is provided in the documentation for disposable products

A major advantage of disposables systems is that they can be used across different scales of production. It is well suited for small-scale research and development activities, as it does not rely on engineering infractures including utilities, hard-piping, or automation is needed to set up and run such operations. This enables the process to be performed on a smaller scale in different environments.

When asking our respondents, how often they seek new products from suppliers, it became apparent that almost one third of respondents would only search for new products if there was an issue or flaw with the product and so are not proactively following the development of the market.

However, this may depend on the size of the company, and with the large-scale organisations it may be less disruptive to stick with one unit unless something is no longer working for them.

We delved deeper in to the continuous investigation of bio processing, from what we see there is a fairly even can split between organisations investigating continuous bioprocessing in downstream and upstream over the next 12 months. Traditionally, upstream processing had more fully embraced single-use technologies but this result demonstrates the viability for continuous processing across the manufacturing line.

The union of single-use systems and process automation has become increasingly prevalent within biopharmaceutical manufacturing over the past decade, these are two of the most predominant advancements in biomanufacturing and the main drivers for these systems have altered very little in recent years. The processes benefitting most from the integration of single-use systems are around contamination and cleaning, reducing water consumption and small-scale commercial production with low numbers of batches per year.

The results gathered in this report demonstrate that organisations are now looking more closely at implementing continuous processes and focusing on the sustainability element of disposable solutions. Single-use technology is gaining popularity as it is the most cost-efficient solution to increase rapidity in drug development, support larger batches of production, and achieve a quicker time to market the solutions. Companies that have integrated and shifted towards a single-use systems have expressed their satisfaction regarding lower costs, enhanced production and reduced overall contamination rates.

Download the full survey report here >>