Can doctors do better than just treat childhood diabetes? Can they prevent it?

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Forbes.com

The biopharmaceutical company's shares tumbled after it announced it needs to lower the dosage of its experimental hepatitis C drug.

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Forbes.com

Pfizer researchers assess ways to improve biologics manufacturing

THE PHARMACEUTICAL industry is making great strides in developing cleaner and more efficient syntheses—that is, greener chemistry—for manufacturing small-molecule drugs. But how green are manufacturing processes for biopharmaceuticals, such as monoclonal antibodies, peptide hormones, and vaccines? And can those processes be greener?

Those are questions Sa V. Ho and colleagues at Pfizer's Global Biologics unit, based in Chesterfield, Mo., are trying to answer. The researchers have set out to determine the type and amount of resources required and the wastes generated by mammalian-cell-culture and microbial fermentation processes that are used to make therapeutic proteins. Their goal is to promote cost-saving process improvements that are also environmentally friendly. In doing so, they hope to stimulate other pharmaceutical companies to join them in developing metrics that illuminate the degree of greenness in biologics manufacturing processes, Ho says.

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Chemical & Engineering News

American Chemical Society

Western custom chemical companies build plants and partnerships in Asia to address their competition head on

"ASIAN TIGERS" is the name economists have used for years to describe fast-growing countries in the Pacific Rim. Today, China and India rank among the world's largest economies and are growing faster than many of the smaller original tigers.

But when the tigers were born a few decades ago, India, for example, was the "tiger in the cage—and the cage was bureaucracy, corruption, and protectionism," says Excelsyn Chief Executive Officer Ian Shott, who has traveled to Asia many times during his career. In the mid-1990s, after India agreed to follow international trade and intellectual property (IP) laws, "the tiger was still in the cage, but the gate was open," he adds.

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Chemical & Engineering News

American Chemical Society