-Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) announced that Dr. Peter Neubauer has been selected to receive a prestigious Agilent Thought Leader Award. As Chair of Bioprocess Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, Dr. Neubauer leads innovative research to identify new methods for more efficient bioprocess development, including genetic, cultivation, and analytical tools, with a particular focus on industrial-scale applications.

“His important work will help the pharmaceutical industry optimize their bioprocesses and accelerate improved healthcare worldwide.”

Automation and high throughput are important for the real-time determination of critical quality attributes (CQAs), thus optimizing biotechnological applications. To this end, substantial resources are being directed toward developing process analytical technology (PAT) – a mechanism for designing, analyzing, and controlling pharmaceutical manufacturing processes by monitoring parameters that impact quality – to ultimately minimize public health risks.

Dr. Neubauer’s work orchestrates hardware, software, automation, mathematical models, and AI to discover optimal conditions for PAT end-to-end workflows. Integrating intelligent technologies and automation into PAT solutions is a key factor for moving the pharmaceutical industry toward optimized bioprocesses that improve safety and reduce hands-on intervention. The Agilent Thought Leader Award will support his ongoing research into understanding and optimizing bioprocesses for difficult-to-express proteins and the development of scale-up/scale-down strategies.

“We are truly grateful and excited that Agilent's award will open up the opportunity to incorporate two-dimensional liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry into our upcoming bioprocess laboratory. The use of such leading-edge instrumentation is a fundamental element in our journey towards achieving a higher level in automated bioprocess development,” said Dr. Neubauer who established and heads the KIWI-biolab as an International Future Laboratory for AI for Intelligent Integrated Biolaboratories. “Given our recent progress in seamlessly orchestrating all devices required in the process, ranging from extensive analyte-specific sample preparation to the management of big data, we feel ready to conquer this next logical step of integration.”

“Agilent is pleased to grant this Thought Leader Award to Dr. Neubauer to support his scientific developments in the biopharma space,” said Sudharshana Seshadri, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Liquid Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry, and Automation Divisions, and executive sponsor of the award. “His important work will help the pharmaceutical industry optimize their bioprocesses and accelerate improved healthcare worldwide.”

The Agilent Thought Leader Award program promotes fundamental scientific advances by contributing financial support, products, and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in the life sciences, diagnostics, and chemical analysis space. To learn more, visit the Agilent Thought Leader Award website.