INTERPHEX 2026: Embedding Intelligence into Bioprocessing
Customized engineering and embedded sensors are helping to turn passive single-use assemblies into intelligent, data-rich assets, reveals Rich Jones from Phillips Medisize.
As the drug development pipeline shifts to more complex modalities, platform approaches that rely on off-the-shelf components and standardized workflows are beginning to reach their limits. Ahead of INTERPHEX 2026, Rich Jones, Vice President of IVD and Life Sciences at Phillips Medisize, details how today’s landscape requires a move toward fit-for-purpose engineering and explains why the next great leap in bioprocessing won’t come from a single silo.
Immense Timeline Pressure
TPN: Speed is a critical aspect of investigational new drug (IND) filings, as such, how are advances in rapid prototyping and iterative design specifically helping bioprocessing firms shave months off their development timelines compared to traditional methods?
Jones: The timeline pressure around IND filings is immense — every month of delay has real consequences for patients and for the commercial viability of a program. In order to traverse quickly and economically from DNA to IND, most companies have adopted platform approaches and technologies composed of off the shelf components from large reputable vendors. The problem with the approach is that off the shelf components often require substantial process modifications to work across various molecules and modalities.
Take for example, the early processes used for the propagation, harvest and the purification of AAVs [adeno associated viruses]. Most of the early processes were borrowed from those previously developed for monoclonal antibody workflows. These approaches often worked but not as optimally as if the processes, workflows, and the underlying components were developed in a fit-for-purpose manner.
At Phillips Medisize we want to be an engineering, development and manufacturing partner who enables rapid iterative redesign of components whether for improving their manufacturability for enabling better, customized, process workflows, and as part of an overall robust supply continuity plan.
Three Areas of Greatest Impact
TPN: Drawing on your background in electronics and interconnectivity, where do you see the biggest opportunity for embedding sensors directly into single-use bioprocessing components to provide real-time data?
Jones: This is where I get genuinely excited, because it sits right at the intersection of the electronics and plastics engineering challenges that lie at the heart of our comparative advantage at Phillips Medisize, and Molex our parent company.
The biggest opportunity, in my view, is moving sensing from being an external, bolt-on function to an intrinsic, embedded feature of the single-use flow path itself. Today, most single-use systems rely on external sensors — clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters, optical sensors reading through tubing walls, or invasive probes that create potential contamination and integrity risks. These sensors work, but they're compromises — they add cost, complexity, and often introduce measurement uncertainty because you're sensing through a barrier or at a suboptimal location. Where I see the greatest near-term impact is in three areas:
First, inline analyte monitoring directly within single-use bags and tubing assemblies. Imagine pH, dissolved oxygen, glucose, and metabolite sensors printed or laminated directly into the film structure of a bioprocessing bag, with thin-film wireless transmission elements that communicate data without any physical penetration of the sterile boundary. The technology building blocks for this exist today in flexible electronics — they're used in wearable medical devices, smart packaging, and IoT [Internet of Things] applications. The challenge is adapting the technology for biocompatibility, gamma or beta irradiation stability, and the regulatory validation framework that pharma demands.
Second, integrity and condition monitoring. Embedding strain gauges, pressure-sensitive elements, or even simple continuity circuits into critical connection points — like aseptic connectors, weld joints, and tubing junctions — could give us real-time, continuous confirmation that a closed system remains closed. Right now, integrity is largely verified at discrete points: a pre-use pressure hold test, a post-use visual inspection. Continuous embedded monitoring would be a paradigm shift for quality assurance.
Third, and perhaps most transformative long-term, is creating a digital thread at the component level. If every single-use assembly carries embedded identification and sensing, you can build a complete, automatic record of what that component experienced throughout its use — temperature history, mechanical stress, fluid contact time, process conditions. That data feeds directly into electronic batch records, supports real-time release, and gives regulators exactly the kind of process understanding they're asking for under ICH Q8 through Q12 and the broader push toward Pharma 4.0. The technical barriers are real but shrinking rapidly. Flexible printed electronics are becoming cheaper and more robust. Low-power wireless protocols like NFC [near field communication] and Bluetooth Low Energy are mature. The bioprocessing industry's adoption curve tends to be conservative — appropriately so — but I believe we'll see the first commercially validated embedded sensor single-use systems within the next three to five years, and within a decade it will be the expected standard rather than the exception. We are excited about opportunities for improvement in real time monitoring of CQAs [critical quality attributes] in intensified continuous processes including the real time electronic measurements in protein titer and other more sophisticated measurements including for example glycosylation, aggregation, multimerization, etc.
Collision of Perspectives
TPN: Finally, what are you most looking forward to at INTERPHEX 2026?
Jones: Honestly, what I look forward to most at INTERPHEX is the collision of perspectives. It's one of the few events where you'll find equipment engineers, process scientists, quality professionals, regulatory strategists, and supply chain leaders all in the same hall, often standing around the same exhibit having a conversation none of them would have had within their own organizational silos.
Specifically for 2026, I'm eager to see how the industry has responded to the dual pressures of the last few years — the ongoing push for manufacturing flexibility driven by cell and gene therapies and personalized medicine, and the supply chain resilience imperative that COVID exposed and that geopolitical dynamics continue to reinforce. I expect to see meaningful advances in modular and portable manufacturing systems, more mature digital integration platforms, and — I hope — a more candid industry conversation about standardization in single-use systems, which remains one of our biggest unresolved challenges.
I'm also looking forward to the conversations that happen between the booths and after the sessions — the ones where someone says, 'We've been struggling with this problem,' and someone else says, 'We solved something similar in a completely different context.' That cross-pollination is where the real breakthroughs start, and INTERPHEX consistently creates the environment for it.
And of course, I'm excited to share what we've been working on at Phillips Medisize and there's no better audience to put that in front of than the INTERPHEX community.
Phillips Medisize will be exhibiting at INTERPHEX 2026 and can be found at stand #3809
About the Interviewee
Rich Jones currently serves as Vice President of IVD and Life Sciences at Phillips Medisize. Rich’s background is somewhat unique in the bioprocessing world — he came up through an academic protein biochemistry track and served as a faculty member at the University of Chicago several years before transitioning to an industry role primarily in the bioprocessing and life sciences and diagnostics space. Over the past 15 years, Rich has focused on bridging the gap between existing bioprocess workflows and innovating to develop more advanced manufacturing technologies and solutions. In his role as marketer and business leader, Rich has spoken with hundreds of customers spanning workflows in early R&D, cell line engineering, CLD, process-development, scale-up, manufacturing and QC. That cross-disciplinary perspective has shaped how he approaches problem-solving in this industry: Rich is always looking at where proven innovations from adjacent fields can be responsibly adapted to accelerate how Phillips Medisize can help in the development and manufacturing of biologics.
Image Credit: © Tierney - stock.adobe.com