Narayana Rao, Vice President, Biopharma, AMEA, spoke to BioSpectrum in May, 2021, about the ways Avantor contributes to the biopharma space

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Avantor has innovated and pivoted to help customers develop and scale-up the production of novel vaccines needed to address the evolving situation.

New product lines, including cGMP, single-use and sera were introduced. One prominent focus was our expanded range of J.T.Baker^® BAKERBOND^® process chromatography resins including PROchievA™, a new best-in-class recombinant protein A resin for monoclonal antibody (mAbs) downstream purification.

While the pandemic dominated the work of biopharma and life science companies, Avantor was also able to focus on multiple, ongoing global needs. In the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa region (AMEA), the chemicals manufacturing footprint at our facility in Panoli, India, served that region well. We also established a biopharma innovation center in Korea, as well as one in China. This expanded our distribution capabilities across the entire AMEA region.

In an interview published in BioSpectrum in May 2021, Narayana Rao Rapolu, Vice President, Biopharma (AMEA) discussed not only Avantor’s contribution to COVID-19 vaccines and mitigation, but described the importance of our work globally – independent of the pandemic – in other areas of biopharma and life sciences. He notably focused on the importance of strong supplier-manufacturer collaboration when it comes to innovating for the future, adding:

"Overall, collaboration with suppliers is a major area that biopharma companies can use to help enhance their regulatory compliance, minimize risk, drive cost-effectiveness and improve time-to-market for any product."

Read the full interview