Integration with Biotech Customer Meets Bulk and Specialty Solution Requests

Challenge

When a company’s ability to succeed relies on your ability to meet concept-to-market deadlines, it can be a lot of pressure — but combine that with an increased workload and an inefficient process model, and it’s downright frustrating! This was the situation in which R&D scientists of a biotech subsidiary at a large life science company found themselves.

Members of the company’s R&D community realized they were spending too much time making solutions for experiments, often repeating the same preparations in multiple groups for multiple projects. The process was costly — wasting time, reagents, and money — and on top of that, the scientists often had difficulty finding their materials, resulting in frequent work delays. What changes to the company’s solution preparation processes would have to be made to put the department back on track?

Solution

The company worked with Avantor Services to develop an onsite Scientific Solutions Laboratory, staffed and managed by Avantor Services associates with scientific experience who would prepare select media, buffers, and bulk solutions for experiments.

Now, scientific solutions are requested through a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). All experiments are entered into the LIMS, where scientists are able to access all documentation from their desktops at any time.

Result

Since creation of the Scientific Solutions Laboratory, the Avantor Services team’s responsibilities have grown to include exclusively preparing all media for R&D projects and experiments utilizing the company’s trademarked antibody. The preparation of this media involves sensitive scientific techniques and detailed record keeping of all procedures. To validate the quality of each prepared batch, Avantor Services performs conductivity, osmology, and pH experiments before making the media available for use.

The Avantor Services team is now fully integrated with both scientists and the work streams at the biotechnology subsidiary. Avantor Services scientists attend strategic meetings to discuss the solution preparation queue, plan experiments, and meet preparation demands, consistently meeting 100% of on-time delivery requests for all solutions.

Additional growth in the responsibilities of the Avantor Services Scientific Solutions team has included support of experiments for the Fermentation Group. The team prepares specially requested solutions for investigative studies of spores. Here, requests are made for traditional and novel solutions using the LIMS. Avantor Services prepares and documents these requests, identifies and solves synthetic issues, and recommends future solutions based on their experiential knowledge.