Across the pharmaceutical industry there is a strong drive towards greater efficiency, from faster time to market, through to better manufacturing practice. Over the last decade, the regulatory environment has changed, as exemplified by the introduction of Quality by Design (QbD), but so too have the economics of the market place, with a buoyant generics sector intensifying the requirement for ...

part of the pharmaceutical industry. The market for recombinant proteins exceeded $ 100 billion in 2011 with a contribution of 45% sales by monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) (1). The introduction of the first mAb biosimilars in Europe raised the competitive pressure in an increasingly crowded market place. The industry faces challenges, such as patent expirations accompanied by approvals of correspo...

With the number of small molecule-based drug candidates in clinical trials and approved drugs for the market decreasing, scientists from the pharmaceutical industry and academia are giving more attention to peptides or other bioactive drugs. Peptide drugs, especially the short synthetic and long-acting ones, are quickly increasing in the global market while advances in such fields as chemical s...