MSD Animal Health raised vaccine output up to 50% with optimization.

MSD Animal Health's Boxmeer facility makes vaccines and therapeutics with living cells, which makes batch-to-batch yield and lead time highly uncertain. Biosafety rules added a strict no-wait constraint between stages, and labor and equipment costs made adding capacity impractical.

A multidisciplinary team worked with Eindhoven University of Technology for three years to build optimization and decision-support tools. They used stochastic optimization, Bayesian design of experiments and simulation, connecting process biology and chemistry with financial trade-offs and business risk.

Industry implementation increased batch yield by up to 50% and generated an additional €50 million in revenue a year. The combined effect of the tools raised production output at the Boxmeer facility by about 97% with no new capital investment in capacity.

Optimize the bioreaction, not just the factory

High biological variability made experienced guesses unreliable and costly

The no-wait biosafety rule forced a tightly coupled, hard-to-hand-tune process

Stochastic optimization handles yield uncertainty that deterministic models average away

More output from existing reactors avoided a very expensive capacity build

When capacity cannot be bought, the leverage is in the recipe; modeling process biology unlocks yield that no new building could.

The work was published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics and MSD Animal Health became a 2022 Franz Edelman Award finalist with Eindhoven University. The team's models were credited with helping make life-saving medicines more available and affordable.