If you were to liken the interest in single-use and disposable technologies in the pharmaceutical industry to terms we are familiar with when talking about hot web topics, you might say they have been “trending” for several years, or perhaps they have gone “viral” — but that might have some negative connotations in the industry, after all the industry is trying to eliminate viruses not promote them.
Or, if you want to harken back to an older (though still in use) metric for gauging what’s popular, you might say that single use and disposable technologies have been in the Top 40 for a long time — or maybe even the Top 10. But I digress.
Single-use and disposable technologies have been in use in the biopharm industry for quite some time now. And while their acceptance as a viable substitute for more traditional processing equipment continues to grow — there is still some hesitance in the industry to adopt single-use entirely for many processes. Innovator biopharm companies are picking places in their processing facilities where they feel single-use technologies can be most beneficial. For biopharm CMOs the choice to go to single-use has been a much easier one — with consideration of lower cost, less cleaning and the elimination of cross-contamination worries among the most important reasons to adopt single-use technologies.
In order to get a better idea of what is going on inside the word of single-use technologies and what the latest thinking and trends are, we talked to several single-use/disposable equipment vendors to get their insights.