Technology for Continuous Production of Medicines

What is continuous manufacturing? How does continuous manufacturing improve a company’s productivity and flexibility? What are the advantages of continuous manufacturing? Which technologies exist and how are they controlled? Why is continuous manufacturing, much faster and leads to better quality? These are questions that we will answer in this course.

Over the last years, pharmaceutical manufacturing has changed tremendously by implementing new and advanced manufacturing methods. This course will provide the fundamentals of continuous manufacturing, focusing on solid dosage forms. The equipment used to produce such medicines will be introduced. Advanced quality control strategies will be discussed.

Clearly, robust process control can only be maintained if the manufacturing process is monitored in real-time. Thus, this course will explain the fundamentals of online measurement, i.e., Process Analytical Technology (PAT) and innovative concepts, such as Real Time Release Testing (RTRT). After taking this course, you will understand the basic principles of continuous manufacturing, the associated technology and you will be able to understand process development and process control for such processes.

What you'll learn

• You will learn why continuous manufacturing can give you huge advantages when establishing a production process.
• We will discuss the different paradigms of batch and continuous manufacturing.
• The basic flow concepts in continuous production will be explained and demonstrated with examples.
• The residence time and its distribution are essential concepts in continuous production; they will be explained in detail. Also, we will introduce methods how to measure the residence time distribution.
• We will discuss the three main continuous manufacturing routes; direct-compaction, dry-granulation, and wet-granulation.
• Material and process properties influence each other. This interaction will be discussed by considering critical material attributes and critical process parameters.
• You will learn to understand the fundamentals of a control strategy based on different process control options.
• Quality monitoring and quality control aspects in manufacturing and process design will be explained.