The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7459 p27
7 July 2007

A reference source for current practices in biopharmaceutical processing

‘Advanced technologies in biopharmaceutical processing’, edited by Roshni Dutton and Jeno Scharer. Pp 336. Price £99.50. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd; 2007. ISBN 0 81380517 1

The total pharmaceutical market is now worth $56bn. Even at an estimated 10 per cent of this figure, the biopharmaceutical sector is still huge and is growing fast as more and more biological knowledge is accumulated and applied to the development of new medicines. Consequently, more and more pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are being turned over to biopharmaceutical processing, and this book is a timely contribution to the industry.

Quite properly, the volume puts biopharmaceutical processing into its historical context — a large part of the industry was, after all, founded on fermentation processes for antibiotics. It then goes on to give comprehensive descriptions of the new processes that are finding their way into both upstream (processes leading to the active pharmaceutical) and downstream (processing the active material into a product) sectors. Chapters on analytical control of biological processes, and the impact and importance of the regulatory environment are essential additions to the text.

Anything with “advanced” in the title runs the risk of rapidly becoming out of date and the editors have partly met this by including lists of relevant websites in the bibliography for about half of the chapters, although, paradoxically, hard copy literature references will still be available long after some of the websites have disappeared.

As an encyclopaedic reference source for the current practices in biopharmaceutical processing, the price seems reasonably in line with similarly targeted specialist texts.


Joseph Chamberlain
(an independent science writer and former editor of the Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology)