Two Prozac and a Valium to Go, Please
Orphan drugs
The pharmaceutical industry's standard practice of batch processing makes it prohibitively expensive to produce drugs in small quantities. That is to the detriment of exceptional medicines such as experimental drugs and 'orphan drugs': drugs needed by only a small number of patients. In these cases too the system can be of use.
40 servings of Prozac
About as big as a kitchen fridge, the machine dispenses around 40 doses of drugs per hour. The scientists have so far managed to produce for types of pharmaceuticals: Valium, Benadryl, Lidocaine, and Prozac. As the system is further developed, the aim is to get medicine with more complex chemical structures on the menu.
The system manufactures one type of drug at a time and has to be reconfigured to switch between products. “Within a few hours we could change from one compound to the other”, said Jensen.
The research project now enters its next phase. Besides synthesizing increasingly complex pharmaceuticals, the researchers aim to develop a system that is 40% smaller than the current model.
Continuous processing
Although the system itself isn't necessarily designed with market disruption in mind, its production method could one day do just that. Manufacturing medicines in one go, it produces in a continuous flow rather than batch by batch. Many stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry promote switching to continuous production because it's less wasteful and more flexible. However, such a transition is not only very expensive but also difficult. "Commodity chemicals tend to be manufactured in a continuous fashion. However, the preparation of pharmaceuticals still proceeds batch by batch, partly on account of the complexity of their molecular structures", the scientists write in their paper.
Myerson, Jensen and others at MIT have been conducting research for several years to develop chemical processing techniques to make continuous production in the pharmaceutical industry possible. Building on that knowledge they developed the portable drug manufacturing machine.
Source: MIT News
Image: Pills. By: ParentingPatch. CC-BY license.
The pharmaceutical industry's standard practice of batch processing makes it prohibitively expensive to produce drugs in small quantities. That is to the detriment of exceptional medicines such as experimental drugs and 'orphan drugs': drugs needed by only a small number of patients. In these cases too the system can be of use.
40 servings of Prozac
About as big as a kitchen fridge, the machine dispenses around 40 doses of drugs per hour. The scientists have so far managed to produce for types of pharmaceuticals: Valium, Benadryl, Lidocaine, and Prozac. As the system is further developed, the aim is to get medicine with more complex chemical structures on the menu.
The system manufactures one type of drug at a time and has to be reconfigured to switch between products. “Within a few hours we could change from one compound to the other”, said Jensen.
The research project now enters its next phase. Besides synthesizing increasingly complex pharmaceuticals, the researchers aim to develop a system that is 40% smaller than the current model.
Continuous processing
Although the system itself isn't necessarily designed with market disruption in mind, its production method could one day do just that. Manufacturing medicines in one go, it produces in a continuous flow rather than batch by batch. Many stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry promote switching to continuous production because it's less wasteful and more flexible. However, such a transition is not only very expensive but also difficult. "Commodity chemicals tend to be manufactured in a continuous fashion. However, the preparation of pharmaceuticals still proceeds batch by batch, partly on account of the complexity of their molecular structures", the scientists write in their paper.
Myerson, Jensen and others at MIT have been conducting research for several years to develop chemical processing techniques to make continuous production in the pharmaceutical industry possible. Building on that knowledge they developed the portable drug manufacturing machine.
Source: MIT News
Image: Pills. By: ParentingPatch. CC-BY license.
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