Cell Bank Establishment & Testing MasterClass - EU edition

Starting with an engineering degree in agriculture, followed by a PhD in plant physiology, I joined the Blood Transfusion Center (Lille, France) in 1982 where I implemented a unit for the development and manufacture of monoclonal antibodies against blood groups, blood proteins and viral antigens. In 1991, I took the position of Head of Process Development and Manufacturing at Sorebio (Martillac, France), a contract manufacturing organization specialized in the development and manufacture of monoclonal antibodies for clinical development. I took the lead of that company in 1998 after it was bought by Serono, a Swiss biotech company (Geneva, Switzerland) in 1994. In 2003, I moved to Serono in Geneva as Global Product Team Leader in charge of managing the development of a recombinant Ig-fusion protein for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, moving that product from Phase I to Phase III. As of November 2006, I’ve been appointed Vice-President, Head of Biotech Process Sciences at Merck Serono, based in Vevey, Switzerland, in charge of developing and validating the manufacturing processes for biotechnological products. In that context, whereas Serono was mainly using perfusion processes for recombinant hormones and cytokines, we moved the company to large-scale manufacture of monoclonal antibodies using proprietary chemically-defined cell culture media and feeds. After our participation to the FDA’s pilot program on Quality by Design, the concepts described in ICH Q8(R2) and ICH Q11 were implemented in our approach to gain process understanding. It was concluded by issuing a modernized approach for process validation at Merck (Darmstadt, Germany). More recently, we have introduced advanced processes such as intensified fed-batch and continuous downstream processing.