Pharmaceutical process engineering for drug development and manufacturing

The pharmaceutical industry has been traditionally a very innovative industry when discovering new drugs. When it comes to manufacturing platforms, the industry still relies on some very standard set of unit operations in manufacturing platform. During manufacturing, pharmaceutical raw materials (i.e., active drug compounds and excipients) are processed by several consecutive process steps or process phases, leading to a final product formulation with the predefined quality. With the increasing diversity of new products and the complexity of the solid-dosage processing at development scale, it is clear that there will be no “one size fits all” solution feasible for future factory-scale manufacturing technologies.

Thus, mechanistic knowledge about the pharmaceutical manufacturing systems using process engineering principles is key to future pharmaceutical manufacturing. Such detailed knowledge can provide valuable insights in estimating the value of existing manufacturing platforms in deliver solutions for new drugs and also provide an opportunity to deliver innovative manufacturing platforms for large-scale drug manufacturing of high quality. The ultimate goal of this research is to streamline the drug product development process and develop a framework that can accelerate to value realization of new manufacturing platforms for the industry.

This project aims at developing mechanistic insight about the equipment used for innovative pharmaceutical production processes (e.g., continuous manufacturing, spray drying, freeze-drying, etc.), and to exploit this knowledge in the development of advanced systems handling challenges specific to pharmaceutical processing.