COVID-19 Webinar Highlights Industry Response

Last Thursday’s webinar panelists delved deep into the coronavirus pandemic, with a focus on the biopharma industry’s response. Steve Fadden, Georgia Keresty and Marc Pelletier (of J&J, Takeda and CRB Consulting Engineers, respectively) began by describing when they first became aware of the pandemic and what they and their organizational teams did to respond. They highlighted timing, ability to mobilize quickly and creatively, repurposing of existing therapies and facilities, removal of old barriers, opening new lines of communication and novel industry partnerships among key factors.

Marc Pelletier described a COVID-19 task force formed at CRB to determine how they could best help the industry. Very early on the task force realized that the timeline did not allow for traditional design-to-build and began looking at existing facilities that might have the needed capacity. They looked beyond the vaccine space to the monoclonal antibody realm since manufacturing vaccine subunits could use technologies consistent with monoclonals. Another part of the effort was to look at existing capacity and determine which bioprocesses could lend themselves to vaccine subunit manufacturing.

Takeda is an international R&D organization with operations in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.  Georgia Keresty and the Takeda team became aware of the growing health concerns in China in January. Takeda’s main concern was how to keep employees and patients safe and continue ongoing clinical trials. These early efforts resulted in models that Takeda was able to roll out to Japan, China, and the U.S. to keep people safe and operations running as the virus spread.

Early on Takeda’s R&D team began looking at repurposing existing therapies and exploring anti-retrovirals for potential use in combating the virus. Furthermore, Takeda has a Plasmids Therapies focus and also formed an alliance with CSL Barring to develop a plasmid-derived therapy with plans for one unbranded product.

Plasma from individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 is also being explored as a treatment methodology. So-called “convalescent plasma” is processed, then used to treat seriously ill patients in a partnership involving many organizations, not just Takeda. Georgia commented that the whole industry is taking this collaborative approach, with work being done in new, unique alliances rather than siloed within individual companies.

Steve Faden from J&J commented that timing is key for his organization as well.  J&J found some success early on by going out and looking for partners and CMOs with capacity that could be repurposed and he and his team are continuing the search.  He emphasized that it is also critical to maintain the current supply of therapies patients rely on to treat other illnesses while finding new capacity to devote to COVID-19.

The panelists went on to discuss collaborations between companies (Sanofi and GSK, for example) which result from organic pairing and are being driven from the C level. In addition, they commented on the efforts by BARDA, FDA and other world health organizations to assist the industry in making connections, taking meetings and exploring new and creative methods to meet the many COVID-19 challenges and also discussed the industry’s global responsibilities post-pandemic and the need to provide a low-cost vaccine to the entire world.

The webinar covered a wealth of information in a highly informative and interesting program. We would like to thank our panelist for their expertise, moderator Aaron Hubble for keeping the discussion flowing smoothly and attendees for their many thought-provoking questions. See you online for our next webinar on May 7, “How to Take the Guesswork out of Your Water Purification System.”