Delivering Biopharma Process Improvements at Avantor’s Innovation Center in Korea
Behind the Innovation with Biopharma Application R&D Head James Hwang
WonHyun (James) Hwang, Head of Biopharma Applications for Asia, Middle East and Africa
James has been with Avantor for almost nine years, working at the company’s Innovation Center in Suwon, South Korea. He and his team develop process improvements to support biopharma downstream production for Avantor clients in Singapore, South Korea, India and beyond.
For someone who wanted to build a career in drug and vaccine development, James Hwang is precisely where he’d hoped to be. James’ career path began 15 years ago while completing his master’s degree, working on a novel large molecule that is now essential in diagnosing and treating tuberculosis. Now, he dedicates his time and knowledge to solving complex downstream production process challenges as Head of Biopharma Application R&D, supporting the pharmaceutical and biotech industry in the Asia Pacific region.
James leads Avantor’s Innovation Centers in Korea, Shanghai and India, technology-driven research and collaboration environments where Avantor works with customers to optimize biopharmaceutical purification processes for various applications, including monoclonal antibodies, vaccines and AAV gene therapies.
James’ focus is on ensuring molecule purity and integrity remain consistent throughout the manufacturing scale-up process. “By the time a therapy gets to commercialization, its properties are stable and can be repeated during manufacturing,” James explains. His team of 15 collaborates directly with customers to solve these challenges, touching on all aspects of application processing, from upstream and downstream process formulation validation to regulatory documentation.
"We focus on two things at the Innovation Centers: customer-centricity and customer satisfaction,” says James. “We begin by conducting experiments at the Innovation Center to understand the customer’s pain points. We then design an R&D staging environment to conduct new experiments on potential product and process solutions.” Innovation Center process optimization consults typically take six months from start to finish.
Collaborating with customers to finalize a production solution involves multiple discussions, technical reviews and documenting the new process, sometimes including product changes. James shares one example: “For one customer, after we addressed the process experiment, we changed out the third-party chromatography product…and the result was molecular purity of more than 99%.” The large molecule at the center of that customer’s process assessment is now in the clinical trial phase.
Learn more about Avantor’s South Korea Innovation Center here.