PBS Biotech Selects Green Cross Medical Sciences as Exclusive Bioreactor Distributor in Korea
Innovative Bioprocess Solutions
NEWS RELEASE, For Immediate Release
PBS Biotech Selects Green Cross Medical Sciences
as Exclusive Bioreactor Distributor in Korea
Firm’s single-use bioreactors offer enabling technology for Korean biopharmas to produce drugs, vaccines and biosimilars for global market
Camarillo, California, July 26, 2011–PBS Biotech, Inc., a developer of state of the art single-use bioreactors for the fast growing biotechnology market, announced today it has signed an exclusive distribution agreement in Korea with Green Cross Medical Sciences Corp. (GCMS), a division of Green Cross Corporation one of Korea’s largest pharmaceutical firms. Under terms of the agreement GCMS will market, sell and support the complete line of PBS Biotech single-use bioreactors for R&D and production to the more than 200 biopharma firms of the burgeoning Korean drug, vaccine and biosimilar industry.
The Korean biopharma industry, now ranked the 12th largest in the world and 4th largest in Asia, has announced plans to be a major global supplier within the next two decades. Today, the country’s pharmaceutical revenues top $20 billion with 8% coming from biotech.
“With the PBS Biotech family of bioreactors, GCMS is expanding the use of disposable bioreactors in the industry,” said Mr. Seung-Sam Seo, president of GCMS. “We believe the PBS single-use bioreactor systems, which offer tremendous value and benefits to our customers, will be a significant and cost effective contributor in helping the industry meet the drug and vaccine needs of our own population and for international customers,” he said.
“GCMS is a premier medical products sales and marketing organization well positioned to introduce and advance the application of our next generation bioreactor systems in the Korea market,” said Dr. Brian Lee, president and co-founder of PBS Biotech.
Rapid adoption of single-use bioreactors is occurring across all stages of the bioprocess as firms embrace single-use technology to drive out costs in both R&D and production while increasing process flexibility, operational efficiency and accelerating time to market. PBS Biotech bioreactors, which employ a low shear Air Wheel™ mixing mechanism, are used in developing plant, animal and insect cell cultures in lab, clinical, seed train and production uses. The bioreactors work with popular industry probes, sensors and analytic devices and perfusion systems including Refine Technology.
Single-use means they use disposable plastic media vessels or bags to grow cell cultures. Unlike the large and complex conventional stainless steel and glass bioreactor systems, which are expensive to buy and operate and require extensive cleaning using massive amounts of water and other utilities, the disposable or single-use bioreactor vessel or bag is used one time and discarded. The industry is rapidly moving to single-use not only to save cost and accelerate time to market but also to promote a ‘green biopharma environment’ and more sustainable operations.
“Our single-use bioreactors are the products of choice for any size biopharma firm migrating from costly and fragmented legacy lab to production bioreactor equipment to a single-use solution providing unequalled mixing performance, low profile and ease of use,” stated James B. Schultz, PBS Biotech vice president of sales and marketing. “With PBS and its channel partners we help create, deliver and measure specific value for our customers resulting in distinct competitive advantage for their business,” he said.
The PBS bioreactors are the industry’s only systems providing low shear mixing to cells and full scalability from R&D to production. The company offers a full line of single-use bioreactors ranging from 3-liter bench-top units to 80-liter stand-alone systems and will be announcing larger scale units in the months ahead. All disposable bags and systems use industry leading USP Class VI materials.
About PBS Biotech
PBS Biotech, Inc. is a US corporation that manufactures fully scalable and easy to use single-use bioreactors for global biotechnology organizations. The company has patented innovative industrial designs and advanced software driven control systems that produce low shear, cell culture solutions improving operational flexibility and process efficiency, reducing operating costs and accelerating time to market for biotechnology customers. With headquarters in Camarillo, CA. the company is poised for rapid growth to support industry demand for single-use technologies. PBS Biotech is a member of the BioProcess Systems Alliance (BPSA).
Contact: James B. Schultz, VP – Sales & Marketing
+1 805-990-6177
PDF Version 
PBS Biotech Exhibits at ESACT, Selected to Present Technical Poster to Entire Global Group of Scientists
Innovative Bioprocess Solutions
NEWS RELEASE, For Immediate Release
PBS Biotech Exhibits at ESACT, Selected to Present Technical Poster to Entire Global Group of Scientists
Poster highlighting novel mixing mechanism and characterization using the PBS single-use bioreactor Air-Wheel™ system wins accolades from ESACT judges
Camarillo, California, May 31, 2011–PBS Biotech, Inc., a developer of state of the art single-use bioreactors used in the fast growing biotechnology market, announced today its technical poster was selected for presentation before the entire 22nd Annual European Society for Animal Cell Technology (ESACT) conference in Vienna, Austria, May 15 – 18. The conference, which brings together leading biotech and pharmaceutical scientists from companies, academic institutions and research centers from around the world to share scientific gains and equipment, is the premier biotech exhibition in Europe.
The poster, a winner in its category, outlines the scientific experiments the company has conducted recently using the Air-Wheel™ mixing technology in its single-use bioreactors with world leading academic institutions and biotech firms demonstrating rapid mixing, low shear and high cell density growth. The poster is entitled: “Characterization of Novel Pneumatic Mixing for Single-Use Bioreactor Application” and can be downloaded from the PBS Biotech web site by clicking here.
On the final day of ESACT, Dr. Brian Lee, PBS Biotech president and co-founder, presented the poster abstract and results before the full ESACT attendee list of nearly 1,000 world-renown scientists and researchers.
In its abstract PBS Biotech team and its collaboration partners outlined the company’s novel bioreactor system which incorporates the patented Air-Wheel technology, promotes uniform and homogeneous mixing and offers low shear environment for cell culture, as evidenced by mixing tests and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling performed over a wide range of working volumes.
The poster was developed based on recent biological tests conducted with Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont, CA; Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnologico (IBET), Lisbon, Portugal, and Green Cross Corporation, Korea. These tests and production runs have shown scalable growth performance for a high cell density process in 3 liter and 15 liter PBS systems and comparable growth and product performance in the 250 liter PBS system against a 300 liter stirred tank system using an Fc-fusion protein-producing process. The poster was jointly created with Dr. Matthew Croughan at KGI, Dr. Manual Carrondo of IBET Portugal, and Sang-Hoon Paik, of Green Cross Central Research Center, Seoul.
PBS bioreactor systems are the first with a pneumatic mixing device powered solely by gas buoyancy, eliminating the need for an external mechanical agitator. The patented design of the Air-Wheel mixing device promotes not only high tangential fluid flow around the wheel but also efficient radial and axial flow. The leverage effect of the Air- Wheel mixing device allows lower gassing requirement (v/v) with increasing working volume.
At ESACT the company exhibited its product line of next generation single-use bioreactors for use in developing cell cultures for wide range of products including mAbs, proteins, vaccines, viruses, stem cells and personalized medicine. The company displayed its PBS 3, PBS 15 and PBS 80 liter bioreactors used in batch, fed batch, perfusion and transient transfection processes and use with micro-carriers and many other cell culture apps.
The company projects rapid adoption of single-use bioreactors across all stages of the bioprocess as firms desire to embrace single-use technology in general and a biotech industry desiring to drive out costs in both R&D and production while increasing process flexibility, operational efficiency and accelerating time to market.
The PBS Biotech line of products are most advanced in the industry featuring ease of use, full scalability from lab to production, low shear from the novel Air-Wheel™ mixing mechanism and plug and play configurations.
About PBS Biotech
PBS Biotech, Inc. is a US corporation that manufactures fully scalable and easy to use single-use bioreactors for global biotechnology organizations. The company has patented innovative industrial designs and advanced software driven control systems that produce low shear, cell culture solutions improving operational flexibility and process efficiency, reducing operating costs and accelerating time to market for biotechnology customers. With headquarters in Camarillo, CA. the company is poised for rapid growth to support industry demand for single-use technologies. The company is a member of the BioProcess Systems Alliance (BPSA).
Contact: James B. Schultz, VP – Sales & Marketing
+1 805-990-6177
PDF Version