With the fast growing speed of the biomanufacturing industry, which is now highly valued and widely developed among the world, there is some necessary work to do for industrial engineers in order to benefit this industry and humankind. The complexity of the biomanufacturing process is one of the problems limiting producing bio-drugs efficiently. Simulation analytics is one of the great methods for better understanding the biomanufacturing process and increasing production rate and good-quality rate. Simulation helps to understand the behavior and outcomes of the biomanufacturing process.
The biomanufacturing process, which our group did simulation analysis on, includes two types of products, Type A bio-drug and type B bio-drug. These two types of bio-drugs have mostly the same producing process. But type A drug needs external media for fermentation processes. For type B bio-drug, the external media is not necessary. But we need to prepare the media internally. The production of internal media is included in the biomanufacturing process. Type A bio-drug and type B bio-drug also have different demands, meaning that in the same time period, the amount of type A and type B needed to be produced are different. Then there is some difference of limitations on the capacity of each process. For instance, the number of equipment for each procedure is different and not fixed. It needs investigation to find the impact of equipment amounts on model performance.
There are some clear objectives of this project, which are shown in the bullet points below: Analyze the model performance By analyzing the model outcome, we will know the performance of the model with the current experiment. After changing some initial setups, the model will show better results or some otherwise outcome, which helps us to analyze and improve our model. Identify the key procedures Some procedures are considered to be critical ones that either limit the performance or are important technically. Finding these important procedures will help us improve the model in the right and available direction. Make modification and suggestions The final purpose of any simulation will be improving the system to achieve a better goal, whether it’s larger productivity or better product quality. So, modifying the model and investigating each result and comparing the outcomes is very important, because based on that, we can give our suggestions about how to improve the process on materials, equipment and some more details. Biomanufacturing Process Illustration The whole biomanufacturing process is split into two parts, the upstream cell culture process and downstream protein purification process. And all processes are presented in the Figure 2-1: Preculture bio-drugs Internal media preparation Inoculum fermentation Main fermentation Centrifuge Chromatography Filtration. Quality Control