Dowpharma consolidates biopharmaceutical process development to San Diego

Dowpharma, a business unit of The Dow Chemical Company, will consolidate its biopharmaceutical customer process development activities to Dow's research & development biotechnology site located in San Diego, California, with the integration of its process development activities from Stony Brook, New York.

This integration is likely to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year.

The San Diego site, located in a regional biotech hub, will focus on the rapid process development and scale-up of client production processes for therapeutic proteins and peptides expressed in various systems.

Originally a Dow AgroSciences r&d site following Dow's acquisition of Mycogen in 1998, it also housed Dow's biotechnology r&d and industrial biotechnology business. With the relocation of Dow AgroSciences' research activities to Indianapolis in 2002, the site remained Dow's corporate biotechnology r&d centre.

In addition to business operations, the four-building San Diego complex houses r&d laboratories, process development labs and a pilot plant focused on process development and scale-up of biopharmaceutical production processes. Major capabilities at the site now include:

• Molecular biology with state-of-the-art genomics and bioinformatics capability used to support optimisation of expression strains;

• Process development with 26 computer-controlled microbial fermenters up to 1,500-litre scale;

• Primary recovery capabilities including disc stack centrifugation, continuous flow centrifugation and microfiltration;

• Purification process development with large-scale chromatography skids, ultrafiltration/diafiltration skids and expanded bed adsorption skids; and

• Equipment for analytical method development and characterisation of therapeutic proteins and peptides

'The cutting-edge work at San Diego is exemplified by the development and recent launch of Protein Factory, a novel Pseudomonas fluorescens-based expression technology for the production of therapeutic proteins and peptides,' said Nick Hyde, Dowpharma business director. 'Integrating all of our biopharmaceutical customer process development activities will allow us to leverage the significant resources and expertise that exist within Dow's biotechnology r&d.'