Date: 2018-09-06
Type of information: Research agreement
Compound: Process Systems Engineering (PSE) methods
Company: Eli Lilly (USA - IN) Imperial College London (UK) UCL (UK)
Therapeutic area: Technology - Services
Type agreement: collaboration - research
Action mechanism:
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Latest news:
- • On September 6, 2018, the Imperial College and UCL (University College London) have announced a new collaboration between Imperial, UCL, and global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company to transform medicines manufacturing.
- Lilly has committed £5 million to fund research into the more efficient manufacture of medicines - which could ultimately result in better and cheaper treatments for patients. The money will be used to fund a virtual lab, led by Imperial, to apply Process Systems Engineering (PSE) methods to the pharmaceutical industry. PSE uses computer assisted methods and models to design, control and optimise processes. The approach has previously been used in the petrochemical, chemicals, and consumer goods industries.
- The Pharmaceutical Systems Engineering Lab (PharmaSEL) will fall under the remit of Imperial and UCL’s Centre for Process Systems Engineering (CPSE) and will see academics from Imperial and UCL undertake research to improve the efficiency of medicines manufacturing.
- Applying PSE methods to the pharmaceutical industry has the potential to increase efficiency, decrease wastage and resolve quality control issues across the manufacturing process. PharmaSEL will seek to catalyse the creation of such methods and will accelerate their adoption in the industry.
- Over an initial period of six years, researchers will focus on three main themes: building more predictive models; designing more effective experiments; and improving the design of pharmaceutical manufacturing systems.
- The first phase of the work will focus on developing virtual models that better anticipate the outcomes of physical experiments. By improving foresight in the modelling of basic pharmaceutical compounds, researchers will be able to reduce the time to market, as well as the quality and effectiveness of drugs.
- The new lab’s work will build on a project funded by Lilly in 2015 and led by Professor Claire Adjiman, Director of CPSE and Imperial’s Institute for Molecular Sciences and Engineering (IMSE). This early research used computer-aided design to prove that the ability to predict solubility of molecules is directly relevant to successful drug development, setting the groundwork for future investigations.
Is general: Yes
