Producing Reliable Products
This profile is part of a series called In It Together, which shines a light on members of the PROGEN team and their contribution to the gene therapy community. The PROGEN team consists of life science and adeno-associated virus (AAV) experts who deliver high quality antibody and exclusive AAV products in order to solve research challenges within academia, biotech, and pharma.
When Rita Lacher was 17, a summer internship opened her up to the wonder of scientific discovery.
At BASF, a large chemical company in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Rita performed a series of experiments that fed her curiosity: she plated spices on agar plates to find out what microbes grew, extracted DNA from a banana, and wet a filter paper marked with ink to discover how the component colors spread.
“I've always been keen on knowing,” said Rita. “I want to know why something happens the way it does.”
That curiosity now serves her well in her role as Head of Production, where she leads the team responsible for maintaining the production of existing products while making the production of new products possible.
To ensure the successful production of a potential new product, Rita collaborates with a number of other departments, including research and development and product management, to assess the specifications of the new product and her team’s capacity to produce it on a large scale.
When demand increased for ELISA kits back in 2020, this scaling up involved enlarging batch sizes, which, in turn, meant purchasing a new machine to further automate the plate-coating process. After many months of searching for and identifying the optimal conformation of a custom machine, she purchased it and the day came to have it delivered.
“The machine was so big it could not go through the staircase,” said Rita. “So we had to take a window out to get it to the lab on the second floor. A crane lifted it up and started moving it through the window, and we were all there watching, wondering how it would be able to come in here without either being broken or destroying the lab. In that moment, we all felt the same. We were shaking and hoping that everything would be fine.”
Luckily, the delivery went smoothly as did the arduous task of qualifying the machine to ensure the specifications of the product produced by the new machine were comparable to that produced by the previous smaller ones.
“It was a really big challenge to get complete this project, but we knew it had to work out,” she said. “And that step only went smoothly because of the contributions of our skilled lab technician Aimé-Cesaire Ngambia and the rest of my amazing team.”
In the end, Rita and her team concluded that the machine worked as expected, enabling them to produce more ELISA kits faster and customers to be able to buy more kits from the same batch.
“When we found out it worked, it was really overwhelming,” she said. “I felt like there were a lot of stones on my shoulders that just dropped off.”
Although Rita shares an overarching goal with many who work in gene therapy to enable patients with rare diseases to receive essential therapies, what drives her on a daily basis are the aspects of her work through which she can make a more immediate difference.
“My fire is lit when we optimize and improve workflows and processes, implement new components for new products into our routines, and scale up processes from research and development to transform an idea into a new product,” she said.
“I am always trying to find the most efficient and effective way to do something to ensure that we produce high-quality products our customers can rely on.”
Interested in learning more about the PROGEN Team?
Meet Head of Research and Development Klaus-Ingmar Pfrepper and find out about his team’s recent discovery of a new AAV antibody.