Martin Hofmann
Managing Director at Biotechflow
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and trained Chartered Chemist with 36 years of experience specialising in the biotechnology, pharma, and environmental industries, specialising in scale-up from laboratory to production scale of biopharmaceuticals API’s; R&D to final commercial production up to 2-meter ID by 1-metre bed height (3,000-litre volume) SS columns.
Equipment and process design, all to cGMP, human injectables installations worldwide, in Europe, USA, Russia, India, Australia etc, experience includes over 20 years R&D and validation at GSK vaccines in Rixensart and Wavre; Genentech (San Francisco); Amgen; Roche; Novo Nordisk, Novartis, BPL; Amgen, etc, long list, long time. MAb’s and vaccines purification.
Lectured for 13 years, 1-week practical courses at Stuttgart University, lecture tours from India to most of USA, Europe, Russia, worldwide.
BSc (Biochemistry); Graduate of the Royal Society of Chemistry (part of the Royal Society); GRSC is equivalent to 1st hons BSc in chemistry; MSc (Instrumental Analytical chemistry); PhD (Chemistry, sponsored by Merck).
Hofmann is registered an Editor for the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) and peer reviewer for Journal of Chromatography A.
Career: 3 years NHS biochemist, pathology dept, designing multiple analytical techniques on post mortem tissues and critical patient physiological liquids for drugs of abuse; 3 years as public analyst on multiple esoteric materials for drugs; 10 years at Amicon/Millipore – chromatography production scale HPLC and LC equipment – design, commissioning, validation and methods worldwide, also in conjunction with Prochrom; 5 years on secondment to Amersham Pharmacia, Uppsala (was GE now Cytiva); 12 year Euroflow, owner/director/initial founder; then at Pall - 5 years international R&D director chromatography production scale equipment original design and applications. Peer reviewer of international Pall colleagues’ projects.
Founder and owner of Euroflow Ltd (founded 1994, UK – sold to Pall, 12 years later). At Euroflow Hofmann is registered inventor on the patent of the chromatography slurry packing valve which revolutionised the process of filling large scale chromatography columns such as the Chromaflow© and the Resolute© ranges. After 12 years of successful trading Euroflow was acquired by Pall in 2005 when Martin joined Pall as international Director R&D for Production Scale Chromatography.
In 2010 Hofmann founded and is 100% owner of Biotechflow Ltd, a company that specialises in original design, manufacture, and validation of bespoke novel solutions to cGMP biopharmaceutical downstream processing. Designed scale-up from laboratory to commercial production of MAb’s using Hofmann’s unique patented Expanded Bed Chromatography (EBA) production scale columns and accessories for 100 to 5,000 litre biomass per run
Inventor of patents for the use of ultrasound to monitor media compression and the detection of monoclonal antibodies in production scale columns, inclinometer for use on Expanded Bed Adsorption columns and production scale EBA columns and accessories.
Hofmann started Biotechflow in 2010 inventing, manufacturing and installing EBA and associated equipment and methods from to commercial production of MAb’s, therapeutic proteins and polypeptides.
In last 10 years of Biotechflow Hofmann designed and project managed production, installation, validation (IQ/OQ) of his EBA columns and processes in the Americas, Europe, and Australia at 600 to 5,000 litre biomass per single EBA step, no clarification steps, 5 to 8 hours per run; unfiltered biomass direct from bioreactor to EBA column.


