Experts Interview: How Enzene Is Leading Bioprocess Optimization in India

Priyanka Gupta, Manager of External Collaborations for Separations Technology at Sartorius, talks to Himanshu Gadgil, CEO of Enzene Biosciences, about our collaboration to create a connected bioprocess for Enzene using Sartorius products and expertise. Learn about Enzene’s biomanufacturing goals and how Sartorius is helping achieve them.

^{This article is posted on our Science Snippets Blog}

Enzene is a company focused on impacting global healthcare by delivering trusted and affordable medicine for a better quality of life. They are doing this by innovating new solutions for continuous biomanufacturing. Biomanufacturing is a complicated process by nature, and it’s made more complex by the unique regulatory challenges it faces. With help from Sartorius, Enzene is working to develop a platform for innovation in India.

Priyanka Gupta (PG): Can you describe Enzene and its philosophy?

Himanshu Gadgil (HG): If you look where innovation typically happens in biomanufacturing, it’s usually in Europe and the United States. We don’t see a lot of innovation happening in other countries. But we believe there needs to be innovation at the local level – and that’s what Enzene stands for.  

Unless you understand local problems, how can you solve them? Cost is a particular concern for emerging countries, so Enzene brings together some of the best minds to develop a platform for continuous manufacturing that will ultimately drive down costs.

PG: Enzene is one of the first companies in the biomanufacturing industry to set up a connected biotech manufacturing platform. Can you tell us why you chose to develop this platform?

HG: Enzene was a little late to get into the biosimilar game, so we had about ten companies ahead of us who had already launched products and built their manufacturing plants when we were first starting out. So, it was necessary for us to look at things disruptively.

If you use the same technologies that others are using, you will be 15 years late by the time you’re ready to launch your product. So, when we started looking at the technologies available to help us control footprint and investments, intensified and continuous manufacturing kept coming up.

We realized the technologies were available – but only in bits and pieces. So, we had to bring all the technologies together to try to disrupt the cost barrier. Our ultimate goal was to ensure that when we launch the products, as many patients as possible would be able to afford the medicine. With that as our focus, we’d be able to increase accessibility to these therapies in countries like India and bring them to global markets as well.  

Watch our in-depth interview video for additional details

PG: What were your criteria when selecting your upstream and downstream equipment for your continuous platform?  

HG: The upstream choice was quite straightforward because Sartorius is very well-known in this space. Our research and development team already had the Ambr^® 250 system, so from a scalability perspective, Sartorius was the obvious choice for our manufacturing.  

For downstream, our goal was to find a good connection that would let us manage the footprint. We have a relatively small manufacturing area – it’s around 1,500 square feet, or 140 square meters. We had to find technology that could use the space efficiently.  

After exploring the available solutions, we went with the Resolute^® BioSC platform. The platform lets us run our entire downstream process while keeping different flow paths separated, which is a regulatory requirement. We can fit our whole process into a small footprint while meeting our goal to manufacture five to ten kilograms every month, and this made the Resolute^® BioSC platform the perfect fit.  

PG: What was it like collaborating with Sartorius to find end-to-end solutions for your biomanufacturing process?

HG: When we started out, we worked together on a lot of cost modeling from a conceptual perspective. That was an important step that showed we could achieve 10 to 20 times more productivity per square foot than we could have in a standard process.

When it comes to continuous manufacturing and all of its moving parts, what’s most important is integration. This is where Sartorius helped us significantly to make sure our units could work together. Without our collaboration with Sartorius, this would not have been possible.

Today, Enzene and Sartorius are continuing their collaboration in an ongoing effort to develop therapeutics that are as accessible as possible to patients in countries like India, as well as the global market.  

Want to learn more about how Sartorius can help support your path to success? Fill out our contact form and a member of our team will reach out and answer any questions you have.

Watch our video for more questions, answers, and insights from Priyanka and Himanshu: