Q&A: Bryan Poltilove on the Future of Bioprocessing

At INTERPHEX 2026, PharmTech sat down with Bryan Poltilove, strategic advisor and independent board director focused on bioprocessing and advanced therapy manufacturing, to discuss how just-in-time, point-of-care manufacturing is revolutionizing biopharma without compromising quality.

Watch the 2-part video interview with Poltilove:
Part 1: Bryan Poltilove on Evolving Bioprocessing Manufacturing Paradigms

Part 2: Point-of-Use Media Manufacturing Could Cut Bioprocessing's Carbon Footprint by Two Thirds

What's Changing in Bioprocessing and Advanced Therapy Manufacturing and What Is Staying the Same?

The fundamentals aren't going anywhere, validation and GMP manufacturing. Nobody's willing to take risks there, nor should they be. The industry standard is well established and well understood.

What is changing is how and where manufacturing happens. We're seeing a significant shift toward point-of-care and place-of-care models, more distributed approaches to manufacturing, and supply chains that are becoming increasingly flexible in how reagents and other products are delivered to the industry. Cost has always mattered, but now environmental sustainability and supply chain resilience are becoming equally important drivers of that change.

How Do You Characterize This Shift?

It's a genuine paradigm change, a change in mentality and approach, not just a tweak to existing processes. The best analogy I can offer is the auto industry in the 1980s moving from large, inventory-heavy operations to just-in-time manufacturing. Biopharma is undergoing something very similar right now.

The key challenge is achieving that flexibility without compromising on the things that cannot be compromised. Reproducibility, availability, quality standards, those are non-negotiable. The goal is to find technologies and supply chain approaches that reduce inventory, make logistics more seamless, and give manufacturers more operational flexibility, all while keeping the product and the regulatory standards fully protected.

Where Are You Seeing this Play Out Most Concretely?

Cell therapy is probably the clearest example. We're seeing modular clean rooms, new cell processing technologies, and unit operations that can realistically be executed in a hospital setting. It's a remarkable development when you think about where cell therapy manufacturing stood even a decade ago.

I'm currently working with Nucleus Biologics, which has a particularly innovative approach to media manufacturing. The model is almost like a Nespresso or Keurig concept for cell culture media. Rather than producing a large, centralized batch and distributing it broadly, you're enabling on-demand, point-of-use manufacturing of the media itself. Their Krakatoa technology is built around that idea, storing powders on-site and only requiring water on-demand, rather than shipping and storing large volumes of liquid media.

What's the Practical Significance of that Powder-Based, On-Demand Approach?

The potential is substantial. Shipping requirements drop considerably because you're moving powder rather than liquid, and storage needs on-site shrink accordingly. Beyond the logistics, you gain the ability to manufacture exactly when and what you need, no excess, no waste.

What makes it compelling is that it combines the best of both existing formats: the ease of use and flexibility of liquid media with the logistical and cost advantages of powder. Bringing those two things together in a single workflow is genuinely innovative.

How Significant Is the Environmental Sustainability of this Shift?

It's increasingly central to how the industry evaluates these decisions. Best-in-class sustainability thinking now looks at total environmental impact from sourcing all the way through disposal, not just what comes out of a single step in the process.

Based on figures I've seen, moving to a distributed, point-of-use model for cell culture products can reduce end-to-end carbon footprint by roughly two-thirds compared to traditional centralized manufacturing. There's enormous promise here, or the industry and for the world more broadly.

How Mature Is the Krakatoa Technology?

It's just getting off the ground. A prototype system has been deployed in academic and industrial labs across multiple continents, used hundreds if not thousands of times, and has demonstrated strong reproducibility, consistency, and reliability at that scale. The commercial launch is happening now. Scaling that performance up to full bioprocessing scale is the next step, and I have every reason to believe the results will follow the same trajectory.