The Reality of Continuous Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Taking place on 26–28 March 2019, GEA, Siemens and Perceptive Engineering will host an inaugural three-day conference to examine the fact and fiction of continuous manufacturing (CM) in the pharmaceutical industry.

The event will comprise two days of presentations from early adopters, one of which will take place at the National Formulation Centre in Sedgefield, UK, courtesy of the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), and a chance to visit the MSD, Cramlington plant, who have recently installed a CDC 50, two ConsiGma™ Coaters, a Bruker Tandem and are utilising Siemens PAT technology.

With an expected attendance of 80–120 delegates and focusing on the real-life experiences of existing users of CM technology in the development and manufacture of oral solid dosage (OSD) forms, topics on the agenda will include the current status of “going conti” as well as future plans and expectations.

GEA has been pioneering continuous manufacturing (CM) solutions for the past 14 years and helping customers to develop, evaluate and optimize continuous processing techniques to enable them to bring new products to market faster and cheaper.

Perceptive Engineering develops and deploys advanced analytics and intelligent control systems to blue-chip clients around the world.

Siemens is a world-leading provider of digital solutions for the entire value chain and, in particular, of PAT Data Management platforms for continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Now gaining momentum in the pharmaceutical industry, CM presents a new approach to OSD form production and meets the industry’s demands for faster product development, reduced costs and increased manufacturing flexibility.

Providing higher yields, lower utility consumption and reduced waste, CM is enabling drug makers to move away from stepwise and time-consuming batch processing to a fully integrated and closely controlled process that gives excellent product consistency by intrinsic design.

The use of CM technologies and inline PAT monitoring is a key driver of building quality by design (QbD) into the complete product lifecycle, from R&D through to manufacturing, with the ultimate aim of getting safer medicines to market in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

Using model-based supervisory advanced process control (APC) to capture unique equipment, material and PAT characteristics creates a system that increases precision and optimizes the yield, capacity and OEE of the CM equipment.

Environmentally friendly with a much smaller footprint, CM is helping the pharmaceutical industry to produce higher quality products, enhance drug safety and reduce its industrial footprint, which provides significant advantages to governments, companies and patients alike.

Further information to follow.