After numerous travel delays and “customer service” by surly ground crew, I finally arrived to face the blazing heat of summertime in Phoenix, AZ. I like the laissez faire customer service of today’s airline industry just about as much as I enjoy 105 degree temperatures. However, I was excited to attend Honeywell’s 2008 User Group (HUG) to learn more about the technologies and advancements that Honeywell is making within the pharmaceutical industry.
There are a lot of active applications of Honeywell’s technologies within the pharmaceutical industry. An area that has particularly captured my attention is the advancements Honeywell is making and is helping to facilitate within the biopharmaceutical sector of the industry.
One of the significant challenges of manufacturing many biopharmaceutical products is the element of randomness or unpredictability within the production process. However, I think that it is fair to say that there is a difference between randomness, unpredictability and a lack of thorough understanding.
For the most part, the natural world, including living organisms, operates within a scope of order. It may be a complex order. An order we really don’t currently fully understand, but order none the less.
Advancements in biopharmaceutical technologies and understandings will help our industry determine the factors that must be controlled for more consistent production. Process automation vendors will be key assets to pharma and biopharma companies as they continue to develop process control technologies based on these understandings.
Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and our sister publications, Control, Control Design and Chemical Processing, will be delivering relevant information from HUG. In addition, I encourage you to read, if you have not already, the “Monitoring Bioprocess” article featured in the May issue of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.
I am looking forward to exciting advancements in the biopharm industry and to our industry’s ability to better control its manufacturing processes. In addition, although I do enjoy Phoenix, I am looking forward to escaping the scorching Arizona heat as I head to BIO in San Diego.
- Tonia Becker, Publisher, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing magazine
