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Oregon Freeze Dry Serves Markets from Food to Pharm
Providing needed preservation and stabilization for both simple and advanced materials
By Kate McPherron

When people hear the name ‘Oregon Freeze Dry’ most still think of food even though the company has for decades offered large capacity and economic efficiency for stabilizing specialty chemicals, biologicals, ceramics,pharmaceutical ingredients, nano-particles and other materials.Although still strong in food, OFD has seen these new markets drive extensive innovation at the company.


OFD uses the term lyophilization to describe its sophisticated stabilization through manipulation of low temperatures, low pressures and other parameters, which move the process into a broader category than merely freeze-drying or sublimation.


Experience and technology applies to a growing range of markets

Founded in 1963, OFD was purchased by Phillip Morris in the late 1970s. In 1985, Dr. Herbert Aschkenasy led the management team that returned to the company to a privately held status. Dr. Aschkenasy, a chemist, saw a technology that was misunderstood and underutilized in solving stabilization problems. He foresaw and effectively expanded the fortunes of the company by working with its talented staff to find ways to apply this technology to areas other than food. One of those engaged to see this expansion was Walter S. Pebley, now the VP for technical and market development, but then a process engineer who had joined the company in 1982.


“He understood the potential utility for the technology and the ability of Oregon Freeze Dry, Inc. to apply it across market segments.” Pebley says of Aschkenasy.“Together, we worked to show how low-temperature, low-pressure stabilization could be applied for a variety of materials,particularly pharmaceuticals, biologicals, nano-materials, and other specialty chemicals.”


OFD bioscience market thrives

OFD grew particularly strong in bioscience, and all signs indicate that its market will continue to thrive. For instance, a recent conclusion at a peptide conference (Peptalk 2010) estimated that 45% to 50% of all new biologics will be lyophilized. OFD is involved in a range of bio-applications,including:

  • Quick oral-dissolve tablets and slow-dissolve wafers

  • Medical foods that manage chronic diseases with prescribed treatment foods that fit into a patient’s lifestyle

  • Biologicals that preserve the viability in numerous bacterial preps, with applications ranging from cGMP, nutraceutical, agricultural and industrial; also, the preservation of platelet growth and hemostatic factors, and advanced wound care and transfusion applications

  • Dietary supplements, including microbial fortification, memory enhancement, herbal extracts and wine fortification (O2-sensitve resveratrol)

  • Medical devices such as antimicrobial and hemostatic pads and stabilizing implantable polymer for aneurysm treatment

“We built an FDA-approved facility for bulk active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and medical devices(wound-care products),” says Pebley. “And we’ve continued growing, adding facilities in the UK and Denmark.”


OFD’s diversification into many markets has led to a unique position: being able to apply its facilities, technical wherewithal, and intellectual property to solving problems across market segments and come up with some novel delivery systems. “We have learned principals of stabilization in one market segment (polymers) and are able to “connect the dots”to other markets such as biologics or propellants.” says Pebley.“Freezing rate and the correlation with particle size that we achieved turned out to be particularly advantageous for the understanding of how to preserve and retain viability in some biological products.”


“By moving away from food into new markets, we have evolved into a contract services organization,”explains Pebley. “We really can market ourselves as a provider of a solution, more a partner or collaborator than a vendor. And we have the intellectual property (IP) to support that: a staff and over 40years experience in designing, fabricating, installing, commissioning and validating all of its own lyophilizers for a range of products and processes. Nearly a third of our employees have been with the company 20 years or longer. That accumulated knowledge, understanding both formulation and critical control parameters like freezing rate,gives us a tremendous advantage in quickly ramping up from proof of concept to scale up to commercialization.”


“Our customers especially appreciate our depth of knowledge about commercial scale-up requirements, an area where there is widely perceived to be a huge void in understanding. We collaborate effectively with a variety of organizations – venture businesses, research universities and established Fortune-100 companies – who seek expertise or more cost-effective processes or reduced time-to-market.”

Succession planning is the solution to maintaining IP momentum

“While we are proud of our IP, we realize we have to build our own talent to maintain and grow our knowledge base,” says Pebley. “We realize we need succession planning. That’s why we’ve been reaching out to universities,local community colleges and even high schools.”


“The first stage, which we’ve been doing for over 22 years, is the college internship program. OFD is one of the founding members of the internship program at OSU. We currently have five engineers working almost year ‘round on bioengineering, chemical, mechanical and computer engineering internships. We've hired some of those interns, and expect we may hire more in the future. We also hope to grow our internships,particularly in the biochemical and microbiological areas, while reaching out to other universities.” To facilitate this, and to keep up on university research, several key OFD employees sit on OSU advisory boards for the departments of chemical, bio and environmental engineering, business administration and mechanical engineering.


“The second stage is through the local Linn-Benton Community College. A few years ago, we helped found mechatronics, a two-year program to develop technicians who can come in and assist OFD engineers in running the lines. That program has received national recognition, and is now a new source of trained employees.”


“The third element is to identify high school juniors and seniors locally who have not decided on a path and help feed them into either the four-year or two-year programs.”

Oregon Bio helps raise the bar

“When the Oregon Bioscience Association was founded, there were distinctly different medical and life science companies all independently operating in Oregon,” says Pebley. “So it was a boon simply to connect those companies to help them grow through collaborations or through networking of markets.Through Oregon Bio, we were introduced to companies across the state who I didn't know were involved in pharmaceutical compliance products, such as Bend Research , HemCon Medical Technologies , Synthetech , Tec Labs and Molecular Probes in Eugene.”


Pebley says Oregon Bio has helped increase the company’s market presence both directly and indirectly. “Now that we’ve all been introduced to one another,when we go out to do contract services, if we don’t have a skillset, we can suggest an Oregon-based company that does. This makes us more attractive to our customer because they do not to have to ship product or samples across the country. We become more of a one-stop shop. For example, we had a medical device customer who wanted to scale up large quantities of a sophisticated reaction. They were going to ship product from Texas to here, so we advised them to try Synthetec in Albany, only a mile away. We made the connections,Synthetec went through the audits to get approved, and now we do the whole process in one location. Another example is a pharmaceutical company that had a peptide that needed to be stabilized. Synthetec did the synthesis and we provided the stabilization.”


The Future for OFD looks bright

OFD sees great potential in for the future, based on more sophisticated applications of its technology such as:

  • A recent patent incorporates freeze-dried egg products with a lyophilized carbon-13 non-radioactive marker to produce a revolutionary breath analysis test for measuring the gastric emptying rate. (U.S. Patent 5,707,602, and WPO 2009152222)

  • A Department of Energy grant is slated to fund the first facility in the world dedicated to the commercial-scale production of nano-engineered synthetic high performance carbon electrode material. This process claims to produce a significantly higher-surface-area activated carbon for ultracapacitors destined for electric cars. Lyophilization is one step in the process of creating and preserving this high surface area for collection and storage of electrons.

At the same time, the company hasn’t stopped trying to think up innovative ways to use lyophilization.Pebley asks us to imagine, for instance:

  • Freeze-dried platelets delivering stabilized growth factors embedded in an advanced wound care platform

  • An oncologist placing a freeze-dried tablet that expands within the space of a removed tumor slowly delivering a significantly smaller dosage of chemotherapy than traditional follow-up mechanisms

  • The use of stabilized dermal grafts reconstituted prior to application on a diabetic foot ulcer

The sky’s the limit at OFD.



Kate McPherron provides strategic communications consulting to organizations in bioscience, energy efficiency, engineering and high tech. Kate’s history includes running successful low-budget, tight-deadline product launches and company introductions; ongoing product/PR management; as well as writing and coordinating documentation projects for large, regulated companies. Key to Kate’s work is unearthing, defending and persuading a viewpoint, often communicating technical information to a less-savvy audience. Contact Kate at kmcpherron@gmail.com

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What is Lyophilization?

In the 1950s, Louis Rey identified the rapid re-absorption characteristics of materials that were freeze-dried, and coined the term “lyophil” from the Greek for “water loving.” Freeze drying is the method of drying food, pharmaceuticals or tissue without destroying their physical structure; material is frozen and then warmed in a vacuum so that the solvent or ice sublimes. Freeze dried products remain stable at normal temperatures for long periods, and, where applicable, may be reconstituted with many of its original properties.

For OFD, Lyophilization is much more than “freeze drying”

Lyophilization lends itself to materials that need to either retain a function – e.g., a monomer such as acetaldehyde that would volatilize by other drying techniques – viability or physical structure, such as crystalline or amorphous states depending upon stability requirements. It’s the most elegant way of stabilizing because it does not alter the end characteristics of the product. It can maximize internal and external surface area, e.g., preserve the maximum surface area for a catalyst as well as prevent the agglomeration of particles, important in air-bag propellant and printing pigments. Materials sensitive to heat, shear, oxygen, shelf-stability and finished weight are also candidates for taking advantage of this technology.
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