Accelerating Biopharmaceutical Drug Development: From Discovery to Manufacturing on a Single Platform
Daeyeon Lee
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104 USA
Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor
Director, Artificial Intelligence-driven RNA BioFoundry
One of the key challenges in drug development is the gap between the methods used for small-scale discovery and those required for large-scale production. Techniques optimized for precision in the lab often do not scale easily to meet the efficiency and regulatory needs of clinical trials and commercial manufacturing. In this presentation, I will showcase how microfluidic platforms can revolutionize both the discovery and manufacturing of drug products. Microfluidics, a versatile tool for precision synthesis, has demonstrated significant potential at the lab scale for producing nano- and microparticle-based drug products. Recent advancements indicate that this approach can be scaled up to commercial production, while preserving the precision and control achieved at the small scale. I will describe our efforts to establish microfluidics as a unified platform for drug discovery and manufacturing, ultimately accelerating the translation of lab breakthroughs into real-world solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. I will use double-emulsion-based drug development as a case study to illustrate how the automation and parallelization of microfluidics could accelerate the commercialization of these drug products. Additionally, I will introduce the newly launched Artificial Intelligence-driven RNA BioFoundry (AIRFoundry), an initiative that leverages emerging computational tools to revolutionize RNA design, synthesis, and delivery, with the goal of democratizing their use in bioscience discovery and applications.
Keywords: microfluidics, emulsions, particles