Case Studies
Scale-up Challenges for Biotech Startup
Biotech startup firms can be caught off guard by the skyrocketing costs of infrastructure needed well before their products achieve commercial success. For this reason, many new life sciences companies select the virtual route by becoming “idea” companies that outsource their development and clinical pipelines. However, it is crucial for such companies to find the right outsourcing partner for every aspect of their business.
Richman Chemical focuses specifically on helping virtual life science startups outsource custom synthesis effectively. We have forged numerous strong alliances with new biotech companies as we collectively seek to accelerate development and commercialization strategies. As an example, Richman Chemical was recently contacted by a virtual firm looking to custom synthesize preclinical and clinical batches of its proprietary API.
The customer came to us with an aggressive timeline and academia-based technology offering significant scale-up challenges. In addition, the company was also experiencing employee turnover--the head of manufacturing had been replaced twice within the previous 18 months. By combining our project management skill set and ability to identify the technological challenges essential for project success, we guided the customer through project development while its management team was reorganized internally.
Further, an alternative process technology was proposed to aid with scale-up issues. Richman Chemical even went a step further and devised a contingency plan in case the new processing technology did not progress as quickly as anticipated. As a result, our customer gained a team of expert project managers who had broad knowledge of drug development and access to a network of cost-effective resources. After initially working from a non-optimized process incompatible with scale-up objectives, the client is now able to accelerate its commercialization timeline after the recent successful manufacture of its target API material.
We look forward to future projects and the opportunity to assist startup firms- virtual or otherwise- with custom synthesis services aimed at drug candidate commercialization. Richman Chemical's main focus is always aligned with helping our clients successfully navigate the chemical synthesis outsourcing maze in an optimized and successful manner!