The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Nripen Singh, Associate Director in Manufacturing Sciences and Technology from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cruiserath, Ireland, as a part of the ChBE Spring Seminar series. His seminar, titled “Next generation manufacturing facilities for expanding portfolio of biologics” will take place on Thursday, April 26th 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.
Demand for innovative medicines that address serious diseases continues to grow for a number of therapeutic areas,
including oncology, fibrosis and immunoscience. Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) is working to tap global potential through its expanding portfolio of biologics, bringing treatments to patients across the globe. However, manufacturing biologics is avery complex and difficult task as it involves working with living cells. In addition, this is countered by challenges of an expanding pipeline and rapid development timelines that necessitate looking beyond the current platform philosophy for how to modify the process with the goal to increase overall productivity in a flexible manner. To address these challenges, BMS is integrating concepts of hybrid, modular and single-use technologies in recently constructed biologics manufacturing facilities in the Cruiserath, Dublin and Devens, Massachusetts campuses. The facilities combine latest technology in terms of flexible fed-batch cell culture and high-performance purification that will allow manufacturing of at various scales. With respect to the upstream process, use of multiple seed trains, single-use bioreactors, and perfusion culture would enable flexible high-titer processes. With respect to the downstream processes, numerous new technologies such as in-line dilution, high capacity membranes, multicolumn continuous chromatography, automated viralinactivation, and SPTFF are being incorporated to handle the increased titers being generated in the bioreactors. Through these advancements, BMS will accommodate both traditional as well as hybrid model for continuous manufacturing interchangeably to support multiple clinical and commercial products.
Nripen is an Associate Director in Manufacturing Sciences and Technology group within Global Product Supply organization in Cruiserath, Ireland at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He leads a team of downstream scientists to provide process improvements and identify new technologies for current and next generation products. Nripen first joined BMS in 2014 and led process development, characterization, technology transfer and commercial support work of mid to late stage biologics within Biologics Development Organization in Devens, MA. Nripen was also responsible for developing next generation manufacturing platform using concepts of continuous processing to increase specific productivity. Prior to joining BMS, Nripen worked for Merck Millipore for 5 years where he led a team of engineers for the development of chromatography and clarification products, including resins, depth filters, and membrane filters for protein purification. Nripen received his B.S. from Panjab University in 2002, and his PhD from the Clemson University in 2007, both in Chemical Engineering. He has co-authored over 25 publications, book chapters and patents. He is in the editorial board of mAbs Journal and serves as the guest editor for Current Opinion in Biotechnology and reviewer for several top-tier journals.