AST Perspectives: Looking Towards a Fill-Finish Future Rooted in American Ingenuity
A Word from AST President & CEO Joe Hoff
It’s common practice at AST to revisit our Mission Statement as we go about our work to provide quality fill-finish solutions to our customers. That mission—to enhance the reliability, productivity and safety of aseptic processing by offering intelligent, intuitive, and innovative solutions—informs every aspect of what we do.
At AST, we talk about achieving solutions that not only meet our customers’ needs but help them reach their big-picture goals. We truly value being part of an industry that is in the business of revolutionizing life-saving drug products, and participating in work that both makes a difference in the lives of real people and contributes to research and development that is instrumental in making medical advancements a reality.
AST’s recent announcement of our collaboration with Germfree on a state-of-the-art, fill-finish isolator solution represents the next step in AST’s vision to bring American ingenuity to the pharmaceutical manufacturing market and provide our customers with unparalleled support and quality.
This is an exciting time in the life sciences industry as numerous advancements are being made across the pharmaceutical sector. When faced with a world-altering pandemic, the healthcare industry answered the challenge with breakthroughs in vaccine development and delivery. Cell and gene therapy, along with other biologics, have seen advancements that are reshaping the way we think about treatment modalities and are paving the way towards a patient-centered model of care. Week by week, it seems, we’re reading about diseases and illnesses previously thought untreatable that are being confronted with scientific innovations, offering the hope of wellness, symptom management, and, in some cases, disease eradication.
The life sciences industry itself is also changing rapidly. The recent pandemic and supply-chain shortages have been a challenge to the manufacturing industry as a whole and have pushed aseptic manufacturing operations to reimagine product delivery. Paramount now is ensuring timely, safe parenteral drug production that is flexible enough to weather uncertainty. For all of us here at AST, these challenges reinforced a foundational conviction: the more local the supply, the more empowered the customer. From the beginning, we’ve been proud to offer premier, American-made fill-finish systems and we’re excited to deepen that commitment in the coming months.
“Customer care” is a day-to-day, lived reality at AST. With this new isolator solution, we’ll be offering customers worldwide an additional dimension of process flexibility with groundbreaking bio-decontamination measures that will set a new standard in bio-decontamination cycle times and, therefore, operational uptime. And by offering a completely US-made, fully integrated portfolio of aseptic fill-finish solutions, our customers will have access to optimized delivery times and service that will set the bar within our industry.
Our dedication to excellence and innovation, rooted in domestic, end-to-end production, is what led AST to develop the industry’s first ready-to-use, multi-format, fill-finish line. Now, as we take this next step, we look forward to continuing to bring our customers American-made fill-finish solutions engineered with precision and the highest commitment to quality.
The future of life science development is bright, and the possibilities are many. AST is thrilled to do our part and provide our customers with the tools they need to meet the demands of an ever-changing industry.
