Life Business Topics

Good Health and Well-being, which is Goal 3 (SDG 3) of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, seeks to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for everyone at all ages. As the world’s population grows and ages, the provision of access to safe food, water, and medicines is becoming an ever-greater challenge. More must be done to ensure a stable supply of these essentials in the future.

Under these circumstances, the food industry is striving to improve food safety and to reduce costs by streamlining production operations, while at the same time enhancing consumer satisfaction by ensuring high product quality. In the water industry, companies all over the world are working to resolve issues that differ depending on region or country, while at the same time seeking to develop and secure the stable supply of water resources, address problems such as water leakage that impact distribution, and improve wastewater treatment to protect the environment. In the pharmaceutical industry, which plays an essential role in providing medicines that people need to lead healthy lives, companies are seeking to complement the production of conventional chemically synthesized pharmaceuticals by developing and producing new biopharmaceuticals from biological materials that are highly efficacious and have fewer side effects. In such areas as the analysis and editing of genomes and cell culture processing, steady progress is being made in the research of biotechnologies for use in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases.

 

Business Overview

Yokogawa’s life business segment provides solutions that support people’s lives and protect health and safety. In addition to our activities in the pharmaceutical and healthcare fields, we are engaged in businesses that ensure everyone has access to safe food and water. To improve productivity throughout the pharmaceutical and food value chains, we utilize our sensing and control technologies to support innovations in products and the production process. In the water industry, we aim to create new value by using the measurement technologies that Yokogawa employs in other fields such as genome analysis and scientific instrumentation.

Our life business covers five domains: life science, bio-processes, pharmaceuticals, food, and water. As for the life science domain, over 3,000 of our dual spinning disk confocal scanners have been installed around the world, and are used together with microscopes to capture images of live cells. In the bio-process, pharmaceutical, and food domains, we provide support solutions covering operations at the management and factory floor levels. In the water industry, we have installed monitoring and control systems for water and wastewater facilities, primarily in Japan. 

Our vision for the life business reads as follows: “We will lead the world in advancing Bio Industrial Autonomy (BIA) and contribute to a future embracing global harmony.” Based on the knowledge and experience that we have gained through our life business activities, we are employing BIA to minimize human interference in the bio-industry value chain, allowing researchers and operators to focus on advanced bio-research and the optimization of production operations.

In the life business segment, we are actively pursuing mergers and acquisitions as well as alliances to acquire technologies, sales channels, products, services, and human resources needed to attain our goals. For example, we took a 100% stake in Insilico Biotechnology AG, a German developer and provider of bio-process software and services, and have also made capital investments in GlyTech, Inc., a global leader in the synthesis of glycans that influence cell metabolism and functional changes; Hirotsu Bio Science Inc., a provider of cancer screening tests; and Pharmira Co., Ltd., a joint venture engaged in the development and manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediates. By combining our technical expertise and knowledge in measurement, control, and information with the new technologies and services acquired by these means, we are able to provide our customers with solutions that enable the pursuit of new knowledge and innovations.

 

 

Solutions for Value Creation:

Single-Cell Analysis

Through the visualization of customers’ challenges, we help them optimize operations and create value by facilitating quick and effective decision-making.

Single-cell analysis of cellular content—an emerging methodology for studying the causes and states of diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders—has been attracting attention for potential use in such areas as drug discovery, personalized medicine, and regenerative medicine. Conventional analysis techniques have issues such as a tendency to cause cell damage and an inability to precisely deliver substances to target cells. Yokogawa’s Single Cellome^TM analysis solution not only minimizes damage to cells but also is able to directly deliver substances to internal sub-cellular target locations. It can also sample specific cells or internal cell components with high precision. This live single-cell analysis solution is enabling the development of new therapies and drugs to treat disease.
 

Single Cellome^TM Cell Analysis Solution
Left: SS2000 Single Cellome System
Right: SU10 Single Cellome Unit

 

Supporting the Volume Production of Biopharmaceuticals

For the discovery of new drugs, our life business offers confocal scanners that can capture images of live cells. We also have solutions that stabilize and streamline cell culture processes used to produce antibody medicines. For pharmaceutical companies that have completed development and are ready to commence the full-scale production of biopharmaceuticals utilizing complex cell-cultivation processes, we are able to reduce time to market by leveraging our over 40 years of experience in many industries and applying our extensive portfolio of products and technologies. Our proven pharmaceutical production solutions, which also include Yokogawa Insilico Biotechnology’s digital twin software technology for bio-processes, are helping to accelerate development and achieve the stable processes needed to efficiently mass produce biopharmaceuticals.

 

 

For the Well-Being of All People

Based on our “Three goals” for sustainability by the year 2050, Yokogawa’s life business is focused on the goal of achieving well-being. We contribute to the supply of pharmaceuticals that save people’s lives and protect their health, and also address the provision of safe food and water so that everyone can eat and drink with peace of mind. To realize well-being, we will act to fulfill our responsibility for the good of all people and society and the future of our planet.