3 questions for Klaus Köhler

The pandemic is reinforcing trends in many industries. Does that apply to life sciences as well? 

Yes, it does. For instance, the crisis has concentrated the industry’s thoughts about bringing the production of base materials from Asia back to the respective consumer countries. Dependence on just a few individual suppliers has become more apparent than ever during the lockdown. This is one of the reasons why the crisis is proving to be a driver of new technologies.

What technologies are we talking about?

We’re seeing a push toward automation and digitalization in order to produce more economically. Vaccine manufacturing highlights the advantages of single-use systems such as disposable bioreactors that make biopharmaceutical production shorter, safer and more flexible. The mRNA platform technologies established as a result of Covid-19 will also make it possible to manufacture other substances using a universal process.The overall trend is toward flexible, continuous, modular and fully integrated systems.

How is Endress+Hauser supporting the industry on its path to the future?

We recently aligned our industry portfolio heavily toward the areas of single-use and digitalization, and are expanding it further. We’re also bringing advanced analysis methods out of the lab and into the manufacturing process. Raman spectroscopy makes it possible to monitor bioanalytics processes and optimize them with models, all in real-time. Long term we want to further merge our portfolios for the lab and commercial manufacturing.