At the second day of a manufacturing conference on MIT’s campus, the CEO of pharmaceutical giant Novartis, Joseph Jimenez, suggested big changes are in store for the way his company makes drugs. A new, experimental method for producing pills could drastically reduce production times, increase revenue, and improve quality, he said.

Typically, drugs are produced batch by batch—workers at a chemical manufacturing plant take a certain amount of raw materials, transform them into active pharmaceutical ingredients, and then often ship the ingredients to another site where another set of workers converts the material into a batch of pills. However, Novartis, and perhaps other drug companies, may make drugs quite differently in the future. The company has been working with MIT for five years to develop a system in which drugs are continuously made, ingredients added as needed, all in one location. The continuous method setup also allows manufacturers to use different chemical reactions than can be used in the batch method.

Jimenez’s presentation suggested the collaboration has been quite a success. Using the typical batch method, it took the company nearly 12 months to turn raw ingredients into packaged pills of Diovan, a Novartis drug used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure. Using the continuous manufacturing method, the same could be achieved in a mere six hours, said Jimenez.

“This will change the way medicine is made around the world,” he said.

The company plans to build a commercial-scale continuous manufacturing facility by 2015. 

“Biotech is about accepting that the unit of production is the living cell,” said Robert Bradway, president of biotech Amgen, to a room of manufacturing business leaders on the MIT campus today. 

The biological therapeutics sold by Amgen and other companies are produced by bacteria or cultured mammalian cells. Even though researchers and companies have been manufacturing drugs in this manner for decades, there is still a lot to be learned about the biology of a cell, Bradway said. “We are still at a very early stage of understanding what happens in cells,” he said. “We need to understand the parameters of production to be able to get more of what we want and less of what we don’t.”

What biotechs like Amgen want more of is their therapeutic product. What they want less of are contaminants, whether they be undesired metabolic byproducts or viral contamination. Bradway pointed to recent drug shortages as an illustration of the challenge of production inside cells. Some 20 percent of the time, therapeutic production lines fail due to substandard product quality, said Bradway. After production quality, the second reason for shortages is production capacity, he said. Amgen itself has not been part of the drug shortage problem, but the company needs to boost its capacity. Amgen is planning “expanding its commercial footprint” from about 50 countries now to about 75 by 2015, said Bradway.

The industry is “ripe for change,” he said. “The idea that you can separate technology and innovation from manufacturing just won’t change where we are going.” 

Nature News reported on Friday that radio waves can activate genes in modified mice.

The study, published in Science, shows that radio waves can be used to trigger calcium flow into a cell, thus activating calcium-sensitive genes. The flow of calcium was controlled by a temperature-sensitive protein called TRPV1.

This protein functions as a gated channel; when heated to 42 °C, the otherwise closed channel opens. By injecting mice with iron-oxide-coated nanoparticles designed to seek out a modified TRPV1, the study’s authors were able to use otherwise harmless radio waves to generate the necessary local heat. The radio waves did not harm exposed cells.

Two years ago, a different group of researchers published a study showing the remote control of temperature-sensitive channel proteins by radio waves in nematodes (roundworms). In that work, the researchers were able to modify the behavior of the worms with the radio waves.

The methodology is far from practical so far, but in theory it could be tweaked to control other proteins or used to regulate other calcium-dependent processes, such as muscle contraction or neuron-to-neuron communication.