Apprentice Briefing Note
Axendia was recently briefed by the leadership team at Apprentice. With 200+ employees and $142MM in venture funding, Apprentice has developed a platform to turn molecules into medicine. “Life Science manufacturing is changing and COVID has accelerated every aspect of that, making Pharma 4.0 no longer an option. When tying in remote work and a younger generation coming into the Life Sciences industry, there’s definitely a transition happening. The offerings we have to help customers through that transition, is what we call the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud,” explained Marie Forshaw, VP of Marketing at Apprentice.
Getting Therapeutics to Patients Faster with the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud
In Forshaw’s opinion, the entire drug production life cycle from preclinical, clinical and all the way through to commercial is underserved. “Apprentice sees MES, in particular, serving primarily the commercial space. However, there is still a need for earlier production teams to have an execution platform that they can use. There are multiple benefits of one platform being used across all three of those stages and expediting tech transfer is one of the biggest. That’s one reason we see the need for the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud is to speed up the scale up phase.
“The other reason is that we see many different systems with a lot of overlapping functionality being used by different teams that are involved in the life cycle. Different teams use LIMS, MES and QMS which creates a lot of overhead and overlap. Making these systems talk to each other and share data requires a lot of effort. The way that we see Tempo making a difference for companies is by unifying all of those features’ functionality and most importantly, unifying the different teams and insights involved in the production life cycle,” explained Forshaw. The company’s vision is to unify these disparate systems starting with MES and LES data and insights. A single governing system will help speed up the production life cycle and help scale it out once a product gets to the commercial stage.
Emilee Cook, Director of Product at Apprentice explained, “to serve the needs of process recipes from preclinical through commercial, an elastic platform is required where the 3 critical factors are necessary:
1) The recipe authoring tool must allow an agile recipe concept where it can easily evolve and gain complexity in iterations across stages and still be usable at every stage.
2) User-generated recipe object templates, parameters, libraries are readily definable.
3) The authoring & execution tools are uniquely designed for and adapt to the user & environment at that stage (the scientist, the operator, the flexible development lab, the rigid shop floor…)”
Adam Cormack, Director Product Management at Apprentice added, “Global events such as COVID-19 accelerated the industry’s need to quickly adapt and pivot, with quick scale-up of new drug production playing a significant role in that shift. Using our flexible, cloud-based manufacturing platform, the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud, customers can accelerate manufacturing with access to centralized data across teams and sites.”
Today, the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud consists of Tandem Collaboration (its first product) as well as MES and LES capabilities, and Augmented Work Instructions, for organizations just starting out in their digital journey. The company has also built no-code integrations specifically for Veeva QMS as well as SAP ERP. For systems that are proprietary or custom, Apprentice has an open API that can be used and customized to adapt and integrate with systems that don’t fit in its out-of-the-box connector strategy.
Case Study
A top 3 biotech company needed to increase its speed and implement a proactive approach to pilot batches. Paper-based batch records were reducing efficiency as scientists manually calculated formulas and physically checked for raw material information and weights.
The company implemented Tempo MES with hands-free augmented reality headsets and mobile tablets that allowed for collaboration, on-the-spot feedback, preventative guardrails, and digital access to all documents. As a result, it was able to replace manual checking with automated formulas, ranges and barcoding.
Additionally, the solution allows for real-time corrections as the system flags errors. Instant and remote access to digitized batch records, standard operating procedures and work instructions are now available. The solution also enables real-time collaboration with colleagues at different sites to share data and provide feedback.
In Brief
Implementing a modern, unified platform is key to achieving digital sustainability for Life-Science organizations. Axendia’s latest market research on the State of Digital Transformation in Life Science Manufacturing shows that the goal of digital transformation is the ability to make data-driven, intelligence-based decisions. Solutions such as the Tempo Manufacturing Cloud from Apprentice will help enable just that.
We will continue to provide updates on Apprentice as they become available.
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The opinions and analysis expressed in this Briefing Note reflect the judgment of Axendia at the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this report is current as of publication date. Information cited is not warranted by Axendia but has been obtained through a valid research methodology. This report is not intended to endorse any company or product and should not be attributed as such.