Catalent Biologics Adopts Berkeley Lights’ Beacon Optofluidic Platform To Accelerate Cell Line Development

Catalent Pharma Solutions and Berkeley Lights announced Catalent Biologics will adopt BLI’s Beacon optofluidic platform to accelerate its cell line development workflow.

The Beacon platform is capable of screening thousands of clones in parallel. In just five days, the top producing clones are identified and scale up can begin, expediting the development process. Automating the process on the Beacon platform increases efficiencies, allows for faster identification of the top producing clones and provides additional insights into the behavior of clonal populations that are currently unavailable using traditional techniques. The four integrated workflows of the Beacon platform – import, culture, assay, and export, will be applied to Catalent Biologics’ GPEx cell line development platform, as well as Catalent’s ongoing research and development activities.

“Catalent has a history of applying advanced technologies to provide a differentiated offering to our customers,” said Mike Riley, Vice President and General Manager of Drug Substance and Bioanalytical services for Catalent Biologics. He added, “Implementing the Beacon platform for cell line development has the potential to significantly accelerate our customers’ development timelines and bring more transformational biologic therapeutics to patients.”

“We are delighted to be working with Catalent and share their vision of speeding timelines and increasing efficiencies for customers,” said Andy Last, Chief Commercial Officer at Berkeley Lights, Inc. “The value that the Beacon platform creates for the biopharmaceutical market can be seen with its rapid adoption. Today, approximately 50% of the top 25 biopharmaceutical companies have implemented the Beacon platform for one or more workflows, and we’re excited that Catalent Biologics is the first technology and service provider to launch the platform in North America.”