Introducing Suzanne Sato, Antheia’s Head of Downstream Processing
As the Head of Downstream Processing, Suzanne Sato leverages her 19 years of experience to lead downstream chemistry processes at Antheia. Her ability to keep the big picture in focus while working collaboratively with various teams is central to the success of Antheia’s mission. Suzy recently sat down for a Q&A in which she shares her insights on the challenges and opportunities that arise when bridging the gap between research, commercial production, and downstream processing in the biomanufacturing industry, as well as the team dynamics that make success possible. Q: Tell us a little bit about your background, and how you came to Antheia? I originally planned on teaching science, but while I was getting my degree in chemistry, I ended up doing two years of research on inorganic chemistry and got bit by the research bug. I discovered I really enjoyed the hands-on work and problem solving that comes with research, and knew that I just had to get a job in the industry. In research, you rely on a lot of things you’ve learned, but you have to adapt and apply it differently most of the time, which means you have to get pretty clever and creative. What drew me to the synbio field specifically was the opportunity to do something sustainable that could truly compete with fossil fuels-based chemistry. For my first job in the industry, I was lucky enough to work for a company called Arena Pharmaceuticals that had its own pilot plant producing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). While at Arena, I worked in chemical synthesis, which provided my foundation for process development with training from chemical engineers and process chemists. I gained hands-on experience with developing chemical routes for scalable processes. This is not as simple as just performing the same chemistry on a larger scale. You have to take into consideration the costs, yields, and cycle times and most manufacturing processes are very different from the original bench-scale process. I also received training working within GMP compliance, learning to understand the gravity of producing APIs that would be tested on human beings is critical in the pharmaceutical industry. Eventually, I joined Amyris, which was my first experience with fermentation products. This is very different from chemical synthesis, as bio-derived products have much more variability. No two fermentations are exactly the same in impurity profiles. This meant the team had to develop very robust processes while at the same time meeting the specifications deduced by the commercial team for customers. In the 8 years I worked with the Amyris team, we had very aggressive timelines and the team had to learn a fail-fast approach. For chemical conversion products, it was about the simplest path to the products, minimizing the number of steps and raw materials. We would try several routes and continuously narrow the possibilities based on testing until the process was defined, then we optimized. An opportunity at Antheia came at exactly the right time. I had built a team at Amyris that was doing really well, and the role at Antheia allowed me to apply my collective career experience from both the pharmaceutical ingredients side and the fermentation process development. It was the perfect combination, so of course I said yes. Q: What milestones in your career are you particularly proud of? One of my proudest accomplishments is that I played a pivotal role in helping the team at Amyris transition from chemical process development to fermentation process development. We were able to pivot quickly and successfully, taking 11 projects to commercial scale. Normally, it takes 18-24 months to develop and scale a process to manufacturing, so for the team to have scaled so many processes successfully in 8 years to meet specifications speaks volumes of their skill. More recently, I’ve been thrilled to be a part of Antheia’s efforts to scale our first products to commercial levels. In the four years I’ve been at Antheia, I’ve had the pleasure of building the DSP team and watching my colleagues grow into skilled industry-leading professionals and prove themselves with every successful run, from pilot to commercial scale. I’d like to think that my aspirations for being a teacher have still been fulfilled at Antheia. Q: Antheia’s core mission is to innovate and transform essential medicine supply chains. Tell us more about how your role as Head of Downstream Processing supports this mission. What are your key responsibilities? As soon as fermentation is complete, the DSP team takes control of the whole cell broth material to begin refining it; it’s our job to purify and isolate our products from what’s known as the fermentation broth. My responsibility is to ensure that we keep the big picture in mind, as it’s easy to become myopic and focus only on the immediate problems at hand, or even go down rabbit holes when conducting bench-scale work at 1-20L scale. Part of that is always remembering that our work must be able to apply to tech transfer, and it needs to scale up to a commercial scale of more than 100,000L. There’s a common misconception that scaling up processes is just about making the bench-scale work bigger, but it’s actually much more complex. Some of that complexity is that we have to be able to speak to the manufacturing team about the engineering aspects of our work, not just the chemistry. Since DSP goes through stages, we have to start with understanding the physical properties of the product. As we scale, we leverage this knowledge while keeping in mind the equipment we have to work with to implement our processes. Our Chief Operations Officer Zack McGahey recently touched on this aspect in his blog, The Road to Commercialization. Another key responsibility in my role is building and managing my team. Our DSP team is composed of both chemists and engineers, and this combination is crucial, in my experience, to ensure that our process can successfully be reproduced and scaled. What I’ve learned is that by the time you
