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PODCAST

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing Podcast for Process Development and Manufacturing Leaders

David Brühlmann - CMC Development Leader, Bioprocess Expert, Business Strategist

The go-to CMC and biomanufacturing podcast for bioprocess development scientists and CMC leaders scaling biologics into regulatory-ready therapies with less trial and error.Practical, execution-focused, and strategic guidance on CMC development, tech transfer, scale-up, GMP readiness, CDMO partnerships, and manufacturing economics for biologics, cell and gene therapies, cultivated meat, and biomaterials.Hosted by Dr. David Brühlmann, CMC strategist, former Bioprocess Innovation Manager at Merck, PhD

science life sciences

All Episodes

25:21

213: From Developability to Formulation: How In...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/12/09

What if you could predict formulation failures before ever touching a pipette? Computational approaches are revolutionizing biologics development, replacing trial-and-error experimentation with predictive intelligence that catches stability issues early and accelerates your path from candidate selection to clinic. In this episode, David Brühlmann welcomes Giuseppe Licari, Principal Scientist in Computational Structural Biology at Merck KGaA. A chemist by training, Giuseppe transitioned from w...

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22:13

212: When the Innovator Becomes the Patient:...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/12/04

What happens when cell therapy innovation meets real patient urgency? In this conversation, the barriers between scientist and patient all but vanish, bringing clarity—and a new sense of mission—to some of the biggest problems facing advanced therapy manufacturing and delivery. Meet Jesús Zurdo, a biotech leader whose three decades of experience in innovation took on a whole new perspective when he became a leukemia patient himself. Seamlessly straddling the worlds of industry and patient car...

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21:25

211: When the Innovator Becomes the Patient:...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/12/02

Real progress in cell and gene therapy shouldn’t be measured solely by scientific innovation, but by whether those innovations actually reach the patients who need them most. In this episode, David Brühlmann sits down with Jesús Zurdo, a scientist who’s spent three decades engineering life-changing biotechnologies, but whose outlook on the field shifted dramatically after becoming a leukemia patient himself. With experience on both sides of the system, Jesús Zurdo brings a rare, unfiltered pe...

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21:49

210: From Batch to Continuous: Building Innovation...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/27

From pandemic-speed vaccine deployment to AI-powered process control, what separates hype from real manufacturing transformation? The biotech industry faces a fundamental challenge: how do you maintain rigorous quality standards while accelerating development timelines, personalizing therapies, and adopting transformative technologies? The answer isn't found in chasing every innovation trend, it's in understanding which changes create genuine value and when to implement them across the produc...

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29:14

209: From Batch to Continuous: Building Innovation...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/25

The biotech industry operates under constant tension: we work with products that directly impact human lives, demanding rigorous controls and validation at every step. Yet standing still means falling behind. The question isn't whether to innovate, it's how to do it without compromising the quality and safety standards that define our industry. Irina Ramos has lived this paradox throughout her career. As a downstream processing leader who's guided CMC programs from early development through g...

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22:37

208: Cryogenic Infrared Ion Spectroscopy: From Mass...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/20

What if you could analyze every metabolite, glycan variant, and unknown impurity in your bioprocess sample—not just the targets you're looking for, but everything that's actually there? Cryogenic infrared ion spectroscopy combined (CIRIS) with AI-powered analysis transforms untargeted screening from aspiration to reality. This episode moves from fundamental principles to practical applications. While Part 1 established how CIRIS overcomes mass spectrometry's structural limitations, Part 2 rev...

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22:35

207: Cryogenic Infrared Ion Spectroscopy: From Mass...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/18

What if you could identify every structural variant in your biologics—without ambiguity, without massive sample requirements, and without the guesswork that plagues traditional mass spectrometry? Cryogenic infrared ion spectroscopy (CIRIS) makes it possible, transforming molecular characterization from frustrating puzzle to precise science. Today's guest, Professor Tom Rizzo, bridges the gap between academic innovation and industrial application. As former Dean of the School of Basic Sciences...

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17:45

206: Process Economics Decoded: How to Model...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/13

Carbon neutrality goals are everywhere in biopharma. But how do you actually measure and reduce your true environmental impact when data gaps and baseline differences make comparisons so tough? In this episode, David Brühlmann talks with Niklas Jungnelius, Cytiva’s expert in process modeling and sustainability, who’s spent years uncovering what really drives emissions and how small process tweaks can deliver big results. Niklas goes beyond the numbers, challenging assumptions and showing how ...

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25:35

205: Process Economics Decoded: How to Model...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/11

Your Manufacturing Decisions Are Costing You More Than You Think Every bioreactor decision. Every scale-up choice. Every facility investment. They're all silently writing checks your process might not be able to cash. The difference between a profitable biologics program and one that bleeds capital? Process economic modeling, the analytical framework that reveals exactly where your money goes and why. In this episode of the Smart Biotech Scientist Podcast, David Brühlmann talks with Niklas Ju...

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20:13

204: Mastering CRO Selection: Essential Questions for...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/06

Cell and gene therapies are transforming modern medicine, but their path to market is fast and complex. They often jump from small trials to global launch at record speed, putting pressure on analytics, supply chains, and partnerships. Success depends on making smart choices about what to build in-house and what to entrust to expert partners. Daniel Galbraith knows these challenges intimately. With decades of hands-on experience and as Chief Scientific Officer at Solvias, Daniel has witnessed...

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28:40

203: Mastering CRO Selection: Essential Questions for...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/11/04

Finding an analytical CRO that's truly invested in your success, not just processing samples, makes all the difference in CMC development. In this episode, host David Brühlmann talks with Daniel Galbraith, Chief Scientific Officer at Solvias, about the essential questions and mindset that lead to breakthrough CRO partnerships. With nearly three decades in analytical development, spanning monoclonal antibodies, biosimilars, and cell and gene therapies, Daniel reveals what separates CROs who be...

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24:00

202: Fighting Antimicrobial Resistance: How AI Cuts...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/30

What if the answer to battling antibiotic-resistant infections isn’t a new antibiotic, but harnessing viruses that have been quietly dominating bacterial populations? Bacteriophages, viruses that target and kill bacteria, have been saving lives for a century, but their true potential is only now being unlocked by modern machine learning. The race isn’t just about discovering effective phages; it’s about deploying the right therapy, personalized to the patient, before time runs out. On this ep...

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24:46

201: Fighting Antimicrobial Resistance: How AI Cuts...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/28

Antibiotic resistance isn’t just a looming problem. It’s a global crisis. Every year, more than one million people die directly from resistant infections, and another 5 million die indirectly. Routine infections are becoming life-threatening, and healthcare systems worldwide are under pressure. Despite decades of warnings, pharmaceutical solutions are falling behind, while “superbugs” continue to outpace new drug development. If trends continue, by 2050, antibiotic resistance could claim 10 m...

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20:32

200: Mastering Quality by Design: From Product...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/23

Your process works perfectly at two-liter bench scale. Then you hit fifty liters and titer drops 20%. By two hundred liters, aggregation appears and charge variants shift. Your management team asks: "How long to fix this?" The honest answer? Three to twelve month, because you're flying blind. In Part 2 of this Quality by Design Master Class, David Brühlmann reveals why scale-up chaos isn't inevitable. It's a solvable engineering problem. Drawing on experience leading bioprocess innovation at ...

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19:44

199: Mastering Quality by Design: From Product...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/21

Over 40% of biotherapeutic failures during clinical development stem from stability problems—and most trace back to protein aggregation that could have been prevented. In this episode of the Smart Biotech Scientist Podcast, David Brühlmann exposes the hidden manufacturing crisis that derails promising biologics programs and delivers the systematic Quality by Design framework that elite biotech companies use to build quality into every process step. David brings two decades of bioprocess exper...

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21:57

198: Mastering ADC Development: CDMO Strategies for...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/16

What happens when the most complex molecules in biotech meet the organizational challenge of managing 300+ analytical scientists? The answer lies not just in the science, but in building systems that turn technical complexity into reliable delivery. In Part 2 of our deep dive with Amanda Hoertz, VP of Analytical and Formulation Sciences at KBI Biopharma, we shift focus from the molecular intricacies of ADCs to the operational mastery required to scale analytical development across multiple si...

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25:58

197: Mastering ADC Development: CDMO Strategies for...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/14

What if the key to unlocking ADC manufacturing success lies in abandoning the platform mindset entirely? Antibody-drug conjugates represent biotech's most promising weapon against cancer: precision-targeted therapeutics that deliver cytotoxic payloads directly to tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. But beneath the clinical promise lies a manufacturing reality that's rewriting the rules of bioprocess development, demanding analytical strategies that most CDMOs simply aren't equipped to h...

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25:04

196: Monolithic Chromatography Innovations: Solving...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/09

What if solving tomorrow’s bioprocessing challenges meant questioning the very physics of chromatography and reimagining downstream processing from the ground up? For years, large biomolecules like viral vectors and exosomes have squeezed through the limitations of traditional chromatography, leaving scientists to wrestle with capacity trade-offs and slow mass transfer. But what if a fundamental shift could unlock breakthroughs for gene therapies, vaccines, and advanced biologics? In this tho...

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20:48

195: Monolithic Chromatography Innovations: Solving...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/07

In this episode, host David Brühlmann is joined by Alois Jungbauer, Professor Emeritus at BOKU University, Vienna, and Scientific Advisor at BioChromatographix International. With over 40 years in bioprocess engineering and more than 400 published papers, Jungbauer offers a unique perspective on how downstream processing and purification technologies have evolved and where they’re headed next. Alois shares his unconventional journey into the world of biotech, starting from humble beginnings o...

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19:18

194: Viral Vector CDMO Mastery: Singapore's Answer to...

Smart Biotech Scientist | The CMC and Bioprocessing... ·

2025/10/02

What if the future of affordable, life-changing cell and gene therapies comes down to one critical yet often overlooked factor: manufacturing efficiency? In advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), groundbreaking science abounds, but the path to the clinic is still strewn with bottlenecks, especially when it comes to cost, complexity, and safety. While the promise is enormous, most therapies remain out of reach for many patients due to high cost of goods and logistical hurdles. What can a...

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261 results

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