To mark its 10th anniversary, Drug Discovery & Development magazine invited industry vendors to reflect on the history and made predictions about future of the industry. Featured here are verbatim comments from this company.
Phenomenex
Headquarters
Torrance Calif.
Location(s)
Torrance, Cailf., USA; Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK; Aschaffenburg, Germany; Le Pecq Cedrex, France; Allerod, Denmark; Castel Maggiore, Italy; Milford, New Zealand; Lane Cove, New South Wales, Australia; Utrecht, Netherlands
Years in Drug Research
26 Years
Spokesperson
Michael McGinley, Bioseparations Product Manager
Web site
About the company
Phenomenex is a global leader in separation science consumables with offices in nine countries and distribution in 60 countries. Our product lines include industry-leading brands of HPLC and GC columns, sample preparation devices, laboratory accessories, and bulk purification media. The markets we serve include pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical drug discovery and development, food safety, clinical and environmental toxicology, forensics, chemical, petroleum and biofuel industries. Phenomenex separation products are used in most aspects of the drug discovery process including research, development, manufacturing and quality control. We distinguish ourselves from other companies in our dedication to customer service and application support.
The company’s line of business as it was 10 years ago. Changes in life science/drug research that influenced business.
Ten years ago Phenomenex’s business was primarily focused on selling HPLC columns to research groups of pharmaceutical companies. Today’s business has expanded to encompass all groups in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies including ADME/ pharmacokinetic researchers, quality control, manufacturing, and process science. Through close collaboration with our customers, our product portfolio has evolved beyond HPLC to include most areas in separation science.
Changes in the industry have led to a greater focus on product quality as well as high-throughput solutions. Drug development has moved from small molecule therapeutics to protein, peptide, and oligonucleotide therapeutics, leading to expansion in Phenomenex’s product portfolio to meet customers’ requirements.
Scientific challenges in the next 10 years.
Industry demand for higher throughput solutions are already pushing separation devices to the theoretical limits of particulate media. Recent innovations in fast chromatography such as monoliths, small-particle and superficially porous media will continue to evolve to meet higher throughput requirements of the future. Microfluidics will play an increasing role, especially for application-specific separation devices in the in vitro diagnostic field. In the sample preparation portfolio, more automated solutions will be required and such solutions will probably be more tightly integrated with microfluidic detection devices for increased sensitivity.
Our work with pharmaceutical customers tells us that better solutions for sample preparation, purification and analysis of biotherapeutics will be needed. The production of current and future biotherapeutics such as antibodies, PEGylated peptides, and oligonucleotides will require better isolation and characterization tools as these drugs become more widely used therapeutic options for disease intervention.
Factor(s) that drove the development of technologies during the last 10 years and greatest area of growths.
Our customers and their application needs have always been the primary drivers in our product development. Market needs for improved separation of analytes have driven Phenomenex to expand beyond analytical media manufacturing and column packing. Demands from pharmaceutical customers for increased selectivity and chemical stability of separation media led to our innovations in new silica technologies and bonding chemistries.
In response to the emerging oligonucleotide analysis and purification market, Phenomenex developed our new line of Clarity Biosolutions.
As the pharmaceutical development pipeline has grown, so have scaleup applications, which required increased sample loads and efficiencies from their separation instruments. In response, Phenomenex developed our award-winning Axia column technology. We see biotherapeutics (proteins, peptides and oligonucleotides) as the primary area of future growth, leading to dramatic innovations in separation products to address the specific needs of such molecules.
Bold Prediction: Where will drug research technology be in 10 years?
In the next 10 years personalized medicine will play a much larger role in drug discovery and development. Personalized therapeutic treatments based on a patient’s genome will start to make an impact on the overall portfolio of drug development companies. Systems biology will play a bigger role in drug development and should reduce both the time and number of clinical trials as well as reduce adverse drug events. Current increases in automation, miniaturization, and throughput will continue, leading to significant reduction in drug development costs that may help offset the increased regulatory burden facing drug developers.
