COPA-DATA
Assembly Line
Smart manufacturing for personalised medicine
An experimental personalised cancer vaccine from Moderna has shown effectiveness against melanoma when combined with Merck & Co Keytruda immunotherapy, cutting the risk of recurrence or death by 44 per cent compared to immunotherapy alone. The vaccine uses mRNA sequences tailored to the unique mutational signature of each patient’s tumours to stimulate the production of neoantigens and elicit an adaptive immune response. Though this type of treatment shows significant promise, manufacturing and scaling up production of personalised medicine like this will be a challenging process.
The unique demands that personalised medicine will bring will require smarter, more advanced methods. Automation and smart software platforms such as manufacturing execution systems (MES) are becoming more commonplace in pharmaceutical manufacturing and will undoubtedly be essential in this new generation of therapeutics.