InSCyT
How to Make Biopharmaceuticals Quickly in Small Batches
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: InSCyT system. Image shows (1) production module, (2) purification module, and (3) formulation module.
Credit: Felice Frankel Daniloff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Today, vaccines and other protein-based biologic drugs are typically made in large, dedicated manufacturing facilities. But that doesn’t always fit the need, and it could one day change. A team of researchers has engineered a miniaturized biopharmaceutical “factory” that could fit on a dining room table and produce hundreds to thousands of doses of a needed treatment in about three days.
As published recently in the journal Nature Biotechnology, this on-demand manufacturing system is called Integrated Scalable Cyto-Technology (InSCyT). It is fully automated and can be readily reconfigured to produce virtually any approved or experimental vaccine, hormone, replacement enzyme, antibody, or other biopharmaceutical. With further improvements and testing, InSCyT promises to give researchers and health care providers easy access to specialty biologics needed to treat rare diseases, as well as treatments for combating infectious disease outbreaks in remote towns or villages around the globe.
