Bioprocessing Facility of the Future

Mer­ck, a sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, unveiled the next com­po­nent of its Bio Con­tin­u­um Plat­form, the Bio4C Soft­ware Suite, cre­at­ing a first-of-its-kind ecosys­tem that com­bines process con­trol, ana­lyt­ics and plant-lev­el automa­tion. This trans­for­ma­tive soft­ware suite will allow users to look across the entire man­u­fac­tur­ing process ver­sus indi­vid­ual oper­a­tional units, giv­ing bio­man­u­fac­tur­ers com­plete process con­trol and deep insights, bring­ing Bio­pro­cess­ing 4.0 to the here and now.

“The future of bio­pro­cess­ing is holis­tic,” said Andrew Bulpin, head of Process Solu­tions, Life Sci­ence, at Mer­ck. “With the launch of our Bio4C Soft­ware Suite, Mer­ck is the first sup­pli­er to con­verge advanced process tech­nolo­gies with soft­ware, automa­tion and ana­lyt­ics into one ecosys­tem, bring­ing us anoth­er step clos­er to mak­ing the dig­i­tal­ly enabled facil­i­ty of the future a reality.”
Bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies today are under immense pres­sure to get prod­ucts to mar­ket faster, with every day of delay cost­ing mil­lions in lost rev­enue. An emerg­ing solu­tion is the inte­gra­tion of soft­ware, automa­tion and ana­lyt­ics into bio­man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties’ oper­a­tions to inten­si­fy bio­log­ic pro­duc­tion, with a vision toward con­nect­ed and con­tin­u­ous pro­cess­ing. The bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try is on a jour­ney to evolve and dig­i­tize the next gen­er­a­tion of bio­pro­cess­ing to increase speed and low­er costs. Bio­pro­cess­ing 4.0 sig­ni­fies this new approach to man­u­fac­tur­ing. The Life Sci­ence busi­ness of Mer­ck has been a key dri­ver of this evo­lu­tion through its Bio Con­tin­u­um Platform.

Merck’s Bio4C Suite was designed based on the “4C strat­e­gy” of its Life Sci­ence busi­ness: con­trol, con­nect, col­lect and col­lab­o­rate. Con­trol is the basis of every­thing Mer­ck does to run all of its sys­tems. Con­nect refers to mak­ing dig­i­tal con­nec­tions between dif­fer­ent process steps and giv­ing that vis­i­bil­i­ty to the entire process. Col­lect is the abil­i­ty to gath­er all data into one place and main­tain and val­i­date the integri­ty of that data. Col­lab­o­rate is how Mer­ck will deliv­er these tech­nolo­gies to its cus­tomers in real time.

Bio4C Process­Pad, part of the “Col­lect” dimen­sion of the Bio4C Suite, is a brows­er-based plat­form that allows users to acquire, aggre­gate and ana­lyze data from dis­parate sources such as equip­ment, batch records, data­bas­es and his­to­ri­ans across the bio­process. The Bio4C Process­Pad auto­mates the data acqui­si­tion and analy­sis tasks, free­ing sci­en­tists and engi­neers to min­i­mize the time to deci­sion and action. Mer­ck will roll out fur­ther Bio4C Soft­ware Suite prod­ucts and mod­ules through­out 2020 and into the future.