Advancement in treatment technologies of biopharmaceutical industrial effluents

Abstract

Biopharmaceuticals have set new standards for blockbuster drugs recently. A blockbuster drug is the one which has crossed $1 billion or more in annual sales. Top 15 biopharma products have annual revenue more than $2 billion, and antiinflammatory drugs like humira are generating $10 billion in revenue per year. These bioproducts are mostly large organic molecules like enzymes, hormones, clotting factors, monoclonal antibodies, and peptide therapeutics compared to a low-molecular-weight pharmaceutical product. Around 1500 biomolecules are undergoing clinical trials, and success rate of a biomolecule to pass a clinical test is twice as compared to pharma molecule. These promising outputs and low side effects of biopharmaceutical products are attracting major pharmaceutical companies, and they are slowly shifting their research and development and sourcing toward these large molecular bioproducts. These molecules are produced mostly inside a bioreactor with upstream and downstream processes, and the effluent contents of these industries are a matter of concern because they contain various unorthodox organic components, i.e., recombinant fermentation broth, extremophiles, bacterial spores, and various antibiotics. The absence of an effective treatment methodology with various bio-industries to deal with this modern organic recombinant sludge is the major reason behind the increase in a number of untreatable superbugs in our ecosystem. There is an urgent need to improve the traditional primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of wastewater treatment methodology to handle this new threat. This chapter provides an insight knowledge to traditional and modern methods implemented for effluent treatment for biopharmaceutical effluents and an advancement of treatment technologies like MODAR supercritical water oxidation, membrane biological reactor (MBR) technology, reverse osmosis technology, ozonation plant technology, and modular thermal plant treatment for effective treatment of biopharma effluent streams to achieve zero contaminant discharge strategy.