Page 275 - Binder2

The Myth of Volume = Victory

For decades, the biopharma industry has been locked in a
race for scale. The logic was simple: the more protein you
can squeeze from a bioreactor, the cheaper your cost of
goods, the higher your margins, the faster you reach
profitability.

This model made sense in a world dominated by
intravenous antibodies and factory-scale cell culture.
Companies poured billions into stainless steel tanks,
optimized their CHO lines for hyper-expression, and
treated every gram of output as progress.

But that logic only holds if the protein you're making is
useful—biologically active, structurally correct, and
immunologically acceptable.

And that’s where the illusion starts to crack.

When More Means Worse

High yield often comes with a cost—one that doesn't
always show up in the batch records, but reveals itself later
in the clinic.

Push a cell too hard and you get:

• Misfolded proteins that don’t bind as intended.
• Aggregates that increase immunogenicity.
• Post-translational errors—like faulty
glycosylation—that turn the therapy into a target.

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