Biological drugs are highly-effective protein drugs produced in living cells.
With the advent of recombinant DNA technology in the late 1970s, biologics emerged as a new source of pharmaceuticals. Since then biological drugs have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and more recently, arthritis, skin and eye diseases. The size and complexity of the proteins which constitute active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in biological drugs is much higher compared with traditional small molecules which are produced through chemical synthesis. A small molecule, such as Aspirin, has a weight of 180 Daltons compared with ranibizumab, the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Lucentis®, which has a mass of 48,000 Daltons.
Biosimilars are approved pharmaceuticals that are similar to a biological reference product in terms of quality, safety and efficacy. They are approved in highly regulated markets such as the EU and USA via stringent regulatory pathways following loss of exclusivity of their originator reference products. Development of biosimilars requires in-depth knowledge of proteins expression, purification, analytics as well as clinical and regulatory aspects.