Bioprocessing: the hidden engine advancing health

One of my colleagues at Cytiva, a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years in the field, was recently diagnosed with metastatic kidney cancer. Tumors had spread to his brain, lungs, bones, and lymph nodes. He was treated with a combination of monoclonal antibody therapies, the vast majority of which depend on Cytiva technologies for their manufacture. Within weeks, nearly every tumor had vanished.

He has described the moment he fully grasped what his life’s work had helped enable as one of the most profound realizations of his career. 

That is what bioprocessing makes possible. And most people have never heard of it.

For decades, the foundation of modern medicine has been chemically synthesized drugs, therapies manufactured reliably at scale. That foundation remains essential and is not going away. But many of the advances generating the most clinical momentum today are biologics, therapies derived from living cells. They include monoclonal and other advanced antibodies that can target disease with precision, gene therapies that correct the underlying cause of illness rather than managing symptoms, and cell therapies that have significantly improved outcomes for patients with certain cancers.

These breakthroughs are not theoretical. They are already changing lives. The development pipeline reflects that momentum. For every biologic therapy approved today, several more are in clinical development. For cell and gene therapies, the ratio is far higher. The opportunity for patient impact has never been greater.

Yet manufacturing has emerged as a central constraint.

Producing a biologic medicine is fundamentally different from synthesizing a chemical compound. A small molecule drug is created through repeatable chemical reactions. A biologic, by contrast, is grown inside living cells through processes that are highly complex and sensitive to variation. After cultivation, it must be harvested, purified, filtered, and formulated at a level of quality and consistency that patients, clinicians, and regulators can trust every single time.

At the center of all of this is bioprocessing.

As scientific discovery accelerates, the gap between what can be discovered in the lab and what can be manufactured reliably, affordably, and at global scale has widened. New therapy modalities are adding further complexity. Manufacturing antibodies is demanding. Manufacturing a personalized cell therapy from a patient’s own cells, often within a narrow treatment window, is an entirely different challenge altogether.

At the same time, demand is growing faster than capacity. The biopharma industry continues to invest heavily in global biomanufacturing, yet development timelines remain long, costs remain high, and the margin for error is small. When supply chains falter or manufacturing slows, clinical milestones slip and patients wait. When processes are inefficient, advanced therapies become more expensive and harder to access.

This makes bioprocessing not only a scientific and engineering challenge, but also an equity challenge. Too often, the most advanced treatments remain limited to regions with the most sophisticated healthcare infrastructure, even as the science itself advances globally.

There is no single solution. Progress will require continued innovation in process technologies that improve yields and reduce costs. It will require digital and automated systems that increase reliability and speed while protecting quality. It will require resilient, visible global supply chains and a workforce trained to operate increasingly sophisticated manufacturing environments.

It will also require something less tangible, but just as important: collaboration.

Bioprocessing challenges cross organizational, geographic, and institutional boundaries. Progress depends on meaningful partnership between technology providers, drug developers, regulators, and healthcare systems. This kind of collaboration has not always been easy, but when it works, the results are unmistakable.

We have seen this before. During the COVID-19 pandemic, shared urgency and collaboration compressed timelines that once seemed immovable. More recently, a personalized gene editing therapy was conceived, manufactured, and delivered to an infant in under a year. These moments reveal what is possible when the field operates with alignment and purpose.

The pipeline of potential therapies is the largest it has ever been. The tools available to support them are more powerful than ever. The work now is to ensure the systems that manufacture and deliver these medicines can keep pace with the science driving them.