CEO Today Healthcare Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today Healthcare Awards 2019 23 NETHERLANDS FIRM PROFILE Making biopharmaceuticals affordable and available for all in need While years of medicine development resulted in thousands of live saving therapies, many biological medicines are still too expensive for people living in low- and middle-income countries. Batavia Biosciences develops and optimises manufacturing processes to reduce the costs involved in producing these biopharmaceuticals. The need for affordable biopharmaceuticals Every minute, two people succumb to malaria, four people to AIDS and 10 people die from cancer or cardiovascular disease. Even when medication is present, it is not always available or affordable for those in need. For instance, one in five children worldwide is not protected with the most basic vaccines. As a result, three children die every minute from vaccine-preventable diseases, such as diarrhea and pneumonia, and tens of thousands of children suffer from severe or permanently disabling illnesses. Every minute counts At Batavia Biosciences, we realise that every minute counts and therefore, we have positioned the company to invest in technologies and capabilities to accelerate biopharmaceutical product availability and improve product affordability. As an example, we have developed STEP® technology for expression of therapeutic proteins, which allows us to produce at least tenfold more product per production run, thus significantly lowering the cost for manufacturing. Our STEP® technology and also our SCOPE® technology (specifically for antibody formats) open the possibility to produce biological medicines at low cost and in high volumes, so that in the future, all in need will benefit. We have also developed SATIRN® technology for thermostable vaccine delivery, a technology important in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, where Malaria, Tuberculosis and AIDS are rampant and cold storage capability is virtually absent. Finally, we are heavily engaged in the development of a novel highly intensified vaccine manufacturing platform together with our partner Univercells (Belgium). The production process is developed on a novel bioreactor design (scale-X™ bioreactor) that delivers very high cell densities and virus yields per bioreactor volume, up to 40-fold higher than traditional technologies. In addition, high efficiency purification membranes (Merck Millipore) and state-of-the-art process intensification expertise can increase process output by a factor of up to 80-fold. This intensification allows miniaturization of the manufacturing facility to such an extent that the output of a traditional 1,200 L traditional stirred-tank bioreactor can be delivered by a 60 L fixed-bed bioreactor. Such intensification makes commercial manufacture possible at lab scale, significantly reducing cost of goods for the manufacture of these vaccines. Profile Batavia Biosciences Batavia Biosciences is a biopharmaceutical contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO). Batavia is highly specialised in product and process development for viral vectors, viral vaccines, recombinant proteins and monoclonal antibodies. The company strives to ease human suffering from infectious diseases by improving the success rate in the translation of candidate medicines from discovery to the clinic. Batavia offers novel technologies and in-depth know-how in order to help their partners to complete preclinical phases in biopharmaceutical product development at higher speed, reduced costs and at an increased success. The company focuses on the early stages of product development including cell line generation, upstream process development (mammalian & microbial), purification development, product characterisation and clinical manufacturing. Headquartered in Leiden, the Netherlands, with a subsidiary in Woburn, Massachusetts, and offices in Hong Kong, Batavia Biosciences is privileged to have strong strategic partners worldwide. MENZO HAVENGA CEO of Batavia Biosciences www.bataviabiosciences.com