Ensuring a robust supply chain to meet demand in the biopharma industry

Pharmaceutical companies around the world have been racing to develop therapeutics to combat COVID-19. These companies recognized an urgent need to rapidly scale up on raw materials and critical products required for testing multiple therapeutic candidates and for mass production – a complex process with many steps.

The objective of 3M Health Care’s Separation and Purification Sciences Division has always been to condense the production process for our customers – to simplify and reduce the number of steps and help them to get more quickly through candidate discovery and development and, ultimately, to have more economical and productive manufacturing processes for successful drugs.

Our 3M scientists continue to find new ways to shorten the timeline – which is especially important now. Our advanced bioprocessing filtration and purification materials help our customers achieve high efficiency, purity and yield from their production processes.

In preparation for future pandemics, it will continue to be important to consider risk diversification and work with our customers to qualify multiple production lines, ideally in different locations around the globe.

When it comes to responding to an enormous uptick in supply demand for critical components to vaccines and treatments, as has been the case in the COVID-19 pandemic, having multiple manufacturing locations can lessen the risk continuity of supply and may provide surge capacity options.

A distributed manufacturing strategy can enhance end-to-end supply chain security and allow biopharma vendors to offer key products at locations that are geographically closer to their pharmaceutical customers.

Read what Robert Befidi, president of 3M Health Care’s Separation and Purification Sciences Division, has to say about implementing a distributed manufacturing plan to enhance supply chain security for biopharma production during COVID-19 and beyond.

3M is proud to be ranked among the world’s leading supply chain organizations in Gartner, Inc.’s Supply Chain Top 25 for 2021.