Portfolio expansion in biopharmaceuticals
29 Oct 2018 | Roquette
NutritionInsight spoke with Kelsey Achenbach of Roquette at CPhI 2018 in Madrid about the company's portfolio expansion in biopharmaceuticals. This year, Roquette’s featured products included the newly launched low endotoxin Kleptose BioPharma HPB/HP grades of hydroxypropyl β-cyclodextrins for protein stability, as well as Dextrose Anhydrous BioPharma for cell culture solutions.
This is Lucy Gunn at CPHI 2018 in Madrid, and I'm here at the Roquette stand joined by Kelsey Ackenbach.
Kelsey, could you tell us a bit about the main focus areas for Roquette this year at the show?
Yes, for Roquette we're really focusing on innovation this year.
We've had a fabulous year of launching new products, new packaging, and launching into new market segments.
So we're really focusing on how we can collaborate with our customers to provide innovation that helps them with either shortening their drug development pipeline or helps them, reduce risk in their development process.
What, what do you see as a company as a health areas of growing importance or growing R&D?
We see a development area that that we're strongly focusing on in the biopharmaceuticals industry.
We there's different therapies coming out like CAR T therapy or.
You know, biologics is, is growing year over year much faster than small molecules, so that was one of the reasons we decided to launch a line of ingredients specifically focused on the biopharmaceutical space.
Can you give us a bit more details about this line?
Sure, so we have, we're, we have carbohydrate sources for cell culture, so cells need carbohydrates to grow to, to.
To live to thrive, and the biologics process is all about growing those cells and then harvesting the proteins from those cells, so we have carbohydrates for the cell culture process.
We also have a platform of ingredients that help with protein stabilization.
So downstream of.
We have a line of polyols and we have hydroxypropyl beta cyclodextrin which we have found has added significant value to our customers by helping to stabilize their proteins, especially in transit.
Now health and wellness is of growing importance to many consumers, and so we're seeing sort of the, pharma and nutrition maybe growing a little bit closer.
How, is Roquette's jumping into this sort of growing trend with pharma nutrition growing closer?
We, we have a very, Roquette as a whole has ingredients that are used both in pharmaceuticals, health, and in.
Functional nutrition so we do see an overlap with our, our food and functional nutrition group when it comes to pharmaceuticals and what we call nutraceuticals.
We have a series of, of proteins.
We have fibers.
We do have functional ingredients that can actually provide functional health to, to the, patients, as as recipients that help deliver that product.
What I see is that consumers are getting more.
More and more focused on preventative medicine, meaning they want to take vitamins to increase their health rather than wait till they get sick and go to the doctor, so it's definitely a trend that that we're positioned for.
We're also positioned to to help with very serious diseases, you know, cancer is on the rise.
We're, we're still, there's many companies looking to treat.
Very specific rare diseases and we have, we have ingredients that can help with, with that process.
Thank you very much.
