BIOREACTORS MARKET ANALYSIS

Market Challenges And Opportunities

Market Drivers

The efficiency of single-use bioreactors has increased across pharmaceutical industries in terms of production, quality control, and procurement. Single-use bioreactors offer advantages such as consistency in production, increase in speed of manufacturing, reduced operational cost, and reduction in manufacturing time of finished dosage form, which foster growth of bioreactors market. In 2016, as per the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), operational cost per gram of monoclonal antibody production (mAb) for single-use bioreactor is around 22% lower than conventional system, mainly due to less labor, utilities, maintenance, and waste. For commercial scale of monoclonal antibody production (mAb), conventional fed-batch bioreactors usually require 10000L – 25000L stainless steel tank to culture cells and produce yield of 2-6 g/L. However, single-use bioreactors employ continuous cell culture supply in 500L - 2000L tank and produces 10 - 30 times higher cell density. Therefore, more quantity of products can be produced by using this single-use bioreactors, with less space and capital cost.  Other factors that contribute to growth of the market include low water usage by single-use systems, less floor space requirement, and low risk of cross contamination in single-use system. Furthermore, in 2016, a case study by Cambridge Healthtech Institute stated that by using single-use (SU) bioreactors, there can be an annual savings of US$ 250,000 in water generation for injections and US$ 60,000 in labor time required to set up and cleaning of stainless steel tank. These factors are expected to drive growth of the bioreactors market over the forecast period.

Moreover, in bioprocessing, enzymes used are specific in their action and produce a pure product. Diseases such as diabetes and anemia are widespread globally, and according to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2014, around 415 million people were living with diabetes, which indicates the need for increasing availability of bioprocessed products at faster rates, wherein, advanced bioreactors could be useful. For instance, bioprocessed products such as Amaryl manufactured by Sanofi Aventis U.S. Llc, and Acarbose by Emcure Pharmaceutical Ltd. are used as anti-diabetic drugs. Thus, implementation of single-use bioreactors has made clinical and commercial production of biopharmaceuticals fast and efficient in limited time and has reduced the cost associated with production, in turn driving growth of bioreactors market.