How to Choose the Right Pump for Biopharma Manufacture

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“The problem for us is we must be really flexible for the customer,” says Laukel. “There is no standard process for us.” That’s why Rentschler set up a multi-product disposable facility for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals, from upstream to downstream, from the cultivation of cells to purification of end-products. The 1,000-liter facility features four independent, yet connectable, all-purpose cleanrooms.

“We have a single-use tangential-flow filtration (TFF) system from Pall and in this system we have a QF1200 pump with a disposable head,” says Laukel. “Single-use systems are very important for the first clinical phases of pharmaceutical production. We have many applications where we have a lot of filtration steps and you don’t want to have to take the time to clean the pumps. Single-use pumps are easier to replace than to clean. With this technology we are much faster. In most cases, we use them only once, but we can also have a dedicated disposable pump head for one product.”

Pharmaceutical Customers Demand Flexibility from Pumps

The single-use pumps also give Rentschler the operational flexibility to meet the needs of a large and varied client base. Depending on the application, Quattroflow QF1200 single-use pump chambers are used pre-gamma-irradiated in TFF or virus-filtration manifold sets from Pall. The flexibility of the pump allows Rentschler to also configure its own manifold sets (e.g. for filtration to reduce bioburden) and to autoclave this setup before filtration starts.

The new facility’s ability to minimize manufacturing costs and product cycle times — and the role that Quattroflow pumps have played in this — was acknowledged in 2012 when the plant won the Facility of the Year Award in the “Equipment Innovation” category from the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), Interphex and Pharmaceutical Processing magazine.

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“We do not have problems with Quattroflow pumps,” says Laukel. “They simply run and have no problems, and if we have really demanding pumping requirements, the choice is the Quattroflow pump. I see no reason not to use them. In the future, we will always want to use Quattroflow pumps.”

* Dr. Andreas Frerix (andreas.frerix@psgdover.com) is Applications Manager Biotech/Biopharma for Quattroflow, Kamp-Lintfort, Germany, part of Pump Solutions Group (PSG)

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