Battlefield medicine: disrupting (bio) pharmaceutical production

Abstract

Conventional pharmaceutical manufacturing, whose outdated processes are fraught with significant operational and logistical issues, fails to address the ‘on demand’ needs of today’s military and civilian patient populations. Recent advances within the DARPA Battlefield Medicine program suggest that innovative and flexible platforms for producing pharmaceuticals and biologics can be developed that minimize waste, improve capacity to handle wide-ranging operational conditions, and manufacture multiple types of therapeutics – all within short time frames. A distributed ‘on demand’ therapeutics manufacturing system obviates the need for individual drug stockpiling, cold storage requirements and complex logistics, while enabling costeffective production of small quantities of medications, such as orphan drugs, and permits the flexibility and responsiveness required in manufacturing to adequately meet the general supply chain needs.