The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2018-2021
MSD Animal Health raised vaccine output up to 50% with optimization.
TU/e and MSD Animal Health built optimization models for biomanufacturing, lifting batch yield up to 50% and adding €50M a year in revenue.
MSD Animal Health
the move
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.
why it works
- 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
what transfers
When capacity cannot be bought, the leverage is in the recipe; modeling process biology unlocks yield that no new building could.
what came after
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.
references
- Operations Research Improves Biomanufacturing Efficiency at MSD Animal Health
- 2022 Franz Edelman Competition: Merck Animal Health
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