AAPS National Biotechnology Conference 2025: High-Concentration Biologics

Biologic drugs typically have a higher dosage than small-molecule drugs, according to Lun Xin, associate director at WuXi Biologics, and sometimes patients will need to spend hours at an infusion center to receive these treatments. “That's a growing experience for a lot of people, especially folks that [are] dealing with things like cancer or long-term arthritis disease or something of that nature, which is lot of time … So, there's a good amount of need for a patient to take [the drug] home and then be able to use pre-filled syringes or autoinjector cartridges, where they can deliver the dose by themselves in the comfort of their home,” says Xin. “Now the limitation with that is you can only put in so much drug into the subcutaneous space using a prefilled syringe or auto injector. And a lot of that's believed to be about two milliliters to be a good benchmark. So now that you have the ideas, and you have to deliver several 100 milligrams of those into a two milligram, two milliliters of volume, right? So, there's a need to develop the concentration of the protein therapeutics to several 100 milligram per mL.”

BioPharm International^® spoke with Xin about these challenges associated with the formulation of high-concentration biologics ahead of his presentation at the AAPS National Biotechnology Conference, which is being held May 4–7, 2025 in Boston. Xin’s presentation, “Accelerating High Concentration Formulation Development with Big Data-Driven High-Throughput Technologies”, occurred on Tuesday, May 6 .

Click the video above to watch part one of our interview with Lun Xin.

About the speaker

Lun Xin is associate director at Wuxi Biologics.