Accelerating the Development and Production of Therapeutics

The focus of the world right now is on how to defeat the Coronavirus and return to more normal times. Manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry are racing at a breakneck pace to develop vaccines and treatments. Automation, analytics play a large role in both the development process for new therapies and ongoing optimized production.

I’ve shared many of the ways how in blog posts in the Life Sciences & Medical category. A few examples include Biopharmaceutical Product and Process Knowledge Management, Real-Time Adaptive Scheduling in Life Science Manufacturing and Predictive and Prescriptive Maintenance in Life Sciences.

I share this as background for an excellent video recorded at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent 2019 conference featuring Moderna Therapeutics. Although this video was recorded before the COVID-19 outbreak was well understood, the principles they have applied in their manufacturing processes have been put to use in their work on a potential vaccine.

Moderna’s Roland Smith, Senior Director of Digital GxP Systems shares how they have built “…a connected, intelligent biopharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain environment.”

Watch the video to learn about Messenger RNA (mRNA), the potential new class of medicines. In the video, Roland notes that the basic idea is to have mRNA instruct the cells in the body to develop the proteins necessary to be the medicine. This mRNA technique combined with Moderna’s digitally transformative approach to their business enables rapid developments.

It’s this technique and digital transformation that is at the heart of the COVID-19 vaccine phase 1 trial and the astounding 63-day development from release of the Coronavirus genetic sequence from China to human dosing for the COVID-19 vaccine phase 1 trial.

Let’s hope this phase 1 trial proves to be successful and can quickly advance through the other phases required. Also, a big THANK YOU to all the professionals working in the Life Sciences industry for your efforts in developing solutions for this pandemic!

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