by Adam Mendez, Alissa Gordon, and Lee Tessler
We would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of (Resilience) Bridget Smith, Senior Systems Engineer; Jonathan Rivernider, Lab Systems Engineer; Brian McNatt, Digital Research Sites Head; John Kerwin, Tech Head of Gene Therapy; Rachel Anderson, Specialist II, Supply Chain; (iOLAP) Alex Guerrero, Principal Solutions Architect; Marko Kos, Data Engineer.
Improving biomanufacturing operational efficiency is crucial for life sciences companies to expedite the delivery of essential medications to patients. Life sciences companies have more digital systems than ever before, but when these systems are disconnected from one another, it detracts from the efficient coordination of people, information, and work that is needed to bring new innovative medications to the market. The industry now looks to the cloud for tools and approaches to create serverless automation between in a manner that can scale.
Resilience is a biomanufacturing innovation company, offering a range of scalable, off-the-shelf biomanufacturing modalities for gene therapies, nucleic acid synthesis, protein purification, and more for leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In this way, Resilience empowers their clients to achieve their goals of bringing new therapeutics to market faster by effectively managing the analytical development, quality control testing, and good manufacturing practice (GMP) services required for scalable drug production.
Traditional contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) tech transfer processes present a number of challenges with consumable inventory management, data provenance, and consumable cost recovery when running experiments on behalf of clients. Typically, consumable costs are roughly factored into the overhead of the project, which can create significant issues in two critical areas. First, tracking exact consumables across the experiments they were used in is essential for data integrity and auditability of the production process. Without precise tracking, it becomes difficult to ensure that the right materials are used in the right experiments, potentially compromising the quality and reproducibility of results. Second, an imprecise charging methodology can lead to inefficiencies in chargeback processes for financial teams. Leftover reagents that were initially factored into overhead but not used effectively can result in wasted resources or, in some cases, complicated efforts to offer these excess consumables back to clients. For Resilience, these challenges underscored the need for a more accurate and efficient approach to consumable inventory management and cost recovery within CDMO operations.
To address these industry challenges, Resilience identified disconnected processes that had been carried out by three separate teams within the R&D department and built a comprehensive platform to remove manual steps. Specifically, these processes included the ordering workflow, the warehousing workflow, and the consumption workflow.
The platform leveraged an event-driven architecture with two native AWS services: AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge. With these services, they integrated two widely-adopted SaaS applications: the Benchling electronic lab notebook and inventory system and the Coupa purchasing system. This combination of technologies and services has allowed Resilience to increase operational efficiency and data integrity in their lab consumable usage. This provided traceability for over 1,000 unique orders in the first three months of use, which equated to over $1 million in previously untracked spend. Read the full article here.
