UK Pharmaceutical Development and Manufacturing Set to Transform

Phil Black - PII Editor 29/01/2016

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Perceptive Engineering Limited is a partner in a newly launched major collaborative project, that is set to transform the UK pharmaceutical industry by enabling the manufacturing processes of the innovative medicines of the future to be designed digitally.

The ADDoPT (Advanced Digital Design of Pharmaceutical Therapeutics) project addresses a key challenge for the pharmaceutical industry; getting new innovative medicines to market in the quickest and most cost-effective way possible to ensure access for patients.

The collaboration will pursue this goal by developing and implementing advanced digital design techniques that eliminate non-viable drug candidate formulations as early as possible, streamlining design, development and manufacturing processes.

‘Digital design’ combines research insight and mechanistic modelling to provide links between raw materials, formulation, manufacturing processes and drug product quality. It spans all operations, processes and procedures during the development and manufacture of medicines, and their in vivo application.

ADDoPT draws on the expertise of UK technology and academic leaders in the field of digital design concepts including Perceptive Engineering, which has specific expertise in data-driven process modelling, monitoring, predictive control and optimisation.

This expertise and experience will be applied to industrial case studies provided by the four major pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb) within the consortium. A key objective is to achieve better design and scale-up for robust products and processes through more targeted future experimentation and better understanding of risk.

ADDoPT builds on UK excellence in big data, mechanistic modelling, process optimisation and control to establish a highly competitive UK knowledge value supply chain for the pharmaceutical sector that will seek to:

protect UK drug manufacturing and support future growth
encourage reshoring of existing pharmaceutical production
contribute to job creation and safeguarding in the pharmaceutical supply chain
enhance UK skills and capabilities through the training of operators and scientists in new design and control tools and methodologies
get new innovative medicines to market as efficiently as possible to ensure access for patients.

Project Lead Sean Bermingham of Process Systems Enterprise Limited said,

“By building on UK excellence in process modelling, optimisation and control, we can give UK pharmaceutical development and manufacturing a genuine competitive advantage in this globally significant sector”.