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Biotech giant CSL has turned to the public for ideas on how to get more bang for its buck from its blood products, offering $40,000 and mentorship as a reward for the winning idea.
The $120 billion blood plasma giant says there is a looming global shortage of life-saving medicines made from plasma, and is calling on experts in all fields for ideas on how CSL can improve its yield from the materials it collects.
A large chunk of CSL’s annual revenues come from treatments made after refining donated blood plasma from the public. Credit:Penny Stephens
Its pharmaceutical arm, CSL Behring, on Wednesday launched the challenge with Australian start-up incubator Cicada Innovations.
CSL Behring’s senior vice-president for plasma product development, Douglas Lee, said the company was casting a wide net for ideas, with CSL wanting to “get the voices of people we might not necessarily hear from”.
CSL has been in the spotlight recently as it develops the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, but the company generates most of its revenues from plasma-based therapies. Its ability to extract treatments from donated plasma efficiently is critical to its bottom line.
Morgan Stanley analysts have extrapolated from a 35 per cent decline in plasma collection by US-based Haemonetics, that CSL’s plasma collection could be down by about 10 per cent in 2020.Credit:Paul Jeffers.
The public call out, which will see the person with the winning idea take home $40,000 and mentorship from the company, comes after a significant drop in the collection of donated plasma over the past year due to the coronavirus pandemic. This, in turn, is expected to lead to supply shortages in the coming months for several medical treatments and hurt sales of immunoglobulin products made by CSL Behring, which banked $US4.3 billion in the first half.
Senior manager at CSL Behring Laura Keigher said there was a shortage of immunoglobulin-based therapies globally and demand was expected to increase in the coming years.
“We believe it is possible to enhance our current processes to collect more [immunoglobulin g] from every litre of donated plasma to help close this gap,” she said. Immunoglobulin g is the antibody CSL draws from donated plasma to make life-saving treatments.