Personalized healthcare, time-to-market pressures, and accurate, timely data collection and dissemination are all significant trends for manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry. Knowing that digital transformation efforts are required is one thing, but determining how best to proceed is another.
In this podcast, Bill Carey joins me to discuss the Life Sciences Showroom facility in the Austin, Texas area. The showroom demonstrates how to address the challenges in developing a path forward. He discusses how technology has simplified tech transfer processes and how real-time data collection and predictive diagnostics can keep production on track to avoid delays caused by rework and information gathering.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Life Sciences & Medical section on Emerson.com for more on the technology and solutions to help drive improved performance and stay ahead of the trends.
Transcript
Jim: Hi, everybody, this is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Emerson is helping our customers accelerate the personalized healthcare revolution and facilitate the end of treatable disease-caused deaths in our lifetime. In this podcast, I’m joined by Emerson’s Bill Carey to discuss the acceleration of technology adoption with demonstrable manufacturing operations management solutions. We’ll talk about the evolution of Emerson Life Sciences’ digital ecosystem with innovative technology. Welcome to the podcast, Bill.
Bill: Thanks, Jim. Great to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great that you’re here sharing your expertise with our listeners. Bill, I moved over from the other Austin area Texas office building, the building you’re in to make room for the Austin Life Sciences showroom. Can you share with our listeners what’s available in that space?
Bill: Yeah, the Austin Life Sciences showroom, it’s a new space that we just built out in the Emerson Innovation Center in Round Rock, Texas. So here we’re able to show off our standardized Emerson Life Sciences digital ecosystem. And this space is now another example that highlights Emerson’s commitment to the life sciences industry. We built this beautiful glass-enclosed conference room with two connected clean room demonstration labs.
Jim: Yeah, it’s really a sight to see over there really beautifully how it all came together. So I guess why is it important for customers to be able to see the depth and breadth of this digital ecosystem?
Bill: Emerson’s here to help our customers realize significant tangible benefits like faster new product introductions, shorter lead times, improved quality and maximizing productivity. But seeing is believing. So by showcasing the Emerson Life Sciences digital ecosystem, we expect to accelerate technology adoption with demonstrable manufacturing operations management solutions. Also, we’re propagating best practices, we’re using current technology and by having the audience’s initial impressions, be a view of an interconnected ecosystem.
Jim: That’s right. It’s one thing, I guess, to talk about it, but it’s a whole other thing to really see some of this in action. So with, you know, that seeing is really believing what’s happening, can you tell us about some of the demonstrations available today?
Bill: Yeah. So as I mentioned, we have two labs. In our lab number two, we demonstrate a one-click tech transfer to scale up a benchtop process to clinical or commercial production. It’s built around a cell culture process for traditional biotech. So we’ve been presenting this demo to customers since January. But of course, we’re continually adding new capabilities. So when we finalize the equipment going into lab one, we’re currently intending to build out a demo also demonstrating one-click tech transfer. But in this case, a scale-out from a process from one to many production lines. And the intention there is to base it on a CAR-T process for advanced therapy medicinal products, or ATMP.
Jim: Yeah, I think that scale up process is the thing that can really shrink the timelines between discovery and usable therapeutics and medicine for our customer. So it’s interesting that you are integrating Emerson software solutions with the physical equipment that our customers would actually use. Can you tell us how you choose what gets included in the showroom?
Bill: We’ve been working with some companies in our OEM partner program. So ideally, the equipment is given to us on a loan or on consignment basis, maybe for two to three years. And then we’ll periodically refresh them to just have everything stay evergreen. So we’re always talking about some of the latest equipment. So far, we’ve been able to utilize OEM partners, DeltaV-specific libraries and graphics. And currently we have an Aplicon three-liter bioreactor, a Thermo Fisher Rotea centrifuge, Kaizen Raman for spectral PAT and a biostat STR 50-liter bioreactor from Sartorius.
Jim: Wow, it sounds like we can begin manufacturing some things there with all that equipment in there. That’s very impressive.
Bill: Yeah, we’ve been talking if we could do any of that after hours.
Jim: Now, that would be fun. So what Emerson products are you currently highlighting in the showroom?
Bill: So we’ve pulled a bunch of things from our DeltaV platform. So we have DeltaV DCS, DeltaV MES–manufacturing execution systems, DeltaV real-time scheduling, DeltaV process specification management with spectral PAT. We’re using both Simca and AspenTech models and our latest offering of DeltaV workflow management.
Jim: And for listeners, there’ll be a transcript that comes along with the podcast and I’ll make sure to add hyperlinks to all of those solutions and products Bill just mentioned there. You mentioned you’re always adding new capability. Can you give us a sneak peek of some coming attractions?
Bill: Well, I’d like to be able to show more about where contextual data is and being able to do monitoring, analysis and reporting on it. So to serve that, I intend to add DeltaV Edge, InMation and Seeq.
Jim: Wow, that the management of data has always historically been one of the huge challenges. So that should be some exciting additions once you have all that in place. So I guess when you’re speaking with customers who come in to the facility, what are some of the key challenges that you hear about from them?
Bill: Well, most often is needing to take advantage of all the data that’s been collected from the islands of automation. And customers want to move forward on their digitalization journey toward a predictive or adaptive plan. But of course, then there’s also the startups to come in that are just working on their first batch records and they need help deciding what even to automate.
Jim: Yeah, I can see that full side that that data is everything. And as we move forward and technology collects more and more data everywhere, managing that, making sense of it, and getting it to provide useful information back that’s actionable is really important. So I guess just as we wind things down a little bit, if a team from one of the life sciences company wants to come visit us, how should they go about getting a visit scheduled?
Bill: They should reach out to their local Emerson business development team. That could be Emerson or an Emerson Impact Partner. From there, we’re going to follow the same process we’ve been using for years when we have folks visiting our IOP [Integrated Operations] Center here in Austin.
Jim: Well, that sounds easy enough. Reach out to one of our Impact partners or people, you know, within the Emerson organization and come here to Austin to check it out. Well, Bill, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and discussing what’s available in our Austin Life Sciences showroom. Thanks a lot.
Bill: Thanks for having me. It’s exciting talking about this new space and getting more folks in here to see it.
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