Overview

All members of the group are invited to attend the AGM with special guest speakers. 

Speakers

Dr Gavin Reynolds, AstraZeneca

“Modelling of particulate processes to support the development of new medicines”

A significant proportion of new medicines are manufactured using particulate processes.  Traditional development has been based on ‘black box’ experimental studies that provide some understanding but can be resource intensive, time consuming and provide limited guidance for scale-up.   Opportunities for increasing the application of simulation in pharmaceutical product development and in so doing increasing the speed, resource and material efficiency and overall level of fundamental understanding are discussed.

Dr Pablo Garcia Trinanes, University of Greenwich

"Linking Particle Properties to Powder Performance in the Process Plant"​

The Virtual Formulation Laboratory (VFL) proposes a practical tool of simulating interactions between components, resulting in information on the flow behavior of particulate materials. Product desired performance within certain formulation specifications requires developing products that present right particle properties during the manufacturing processes and also when consumers use them. The manufacturing processes for these products present challenges that lead to delays in the path to productivity and increased development costs.
Building a knowledge database from existing components and fine-tuning the relationships based on physical properties (related to morphology and/or intrinsic properties) should allow prediction of behavior in manufacturing scenarios and guide technology choice at an early stage.

This study investigates the relationship between particle-scale interactions dominated by the cohesive van der Waals force and the flow function. We developed a tool for prediction and optimisation of manufacturability of advanced solids-based formulations which will be used by industries allowing to quickly and accurately measure the flow properties of their materials for a range of purposes, from bench marking and quality control to assisting reformulation. In the framework of the collaborative project VFL, a large set of physical experiments using different devices commonly used for powder characterization are carried out with the objective of evaluate reproducibility. In these set of experiments we look at the particle size influence for evaluation of bulk behavior considering microscopic particle properties and cohesion strength.​