PSE and Siemens join partnership to advance continuous drug manufacturing

THE UK’s Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre has expanded its partners to include PSE, Siemens, and Perceptive Engineering in a push to advance continuous drugs manufacture.

The centre, which is due for completion in Scotland in 2021, is a collaboration between the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), the University of Strathclyde, and Big Pharma partners AstraZeneca and GSK.

The Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre said the new partners will help the centre fulfil its ambition to research how oral solid dosage medicines can be produced more robustly and efficiently; and more quickly deliver medicines to patients.

PSE supplies advanced process modelling software that it says will use predictive process modelling to help move industry away from a “design-make-test” development cycle and towards a “predict first” model. This will reorder development to a design-test-make model that will result in fast, sustainable and cost-effective manufacturing process development, the partners said.

Perceptive Engineering will use its software to provide advanced process control and Siemens will contribute expertise in process automation for pharmaceutical manufacture.

Sean Bermingham, Head of Formulated Products at PSE, said: “We are excited to be part of this initiative aimed at publicly demonstrating the benefits that digital design and digital operation approaches bring to the development and operation of continuous drug manufacture processes.”