ADDoPT project set to transform the UK pharma industry

A newly launched major collaborative project is set to transform the UK pharmaceutical industry by enabling the manufacturing processes of the innovative medicines of the future to be designed digitally.

The ADDoPT (Advanced Digital Design of Pharmaceutical Therapeutics) project addresses a key challenge for the pharmaceutical industry: getting new innovative medicines to market in the quickest and most cost-effective way possible to ensure access for patients. The collaboration will pursue this goal by developing and implementing advanced digital design techniques that eliminate non-viable drug candidate formulations as early as possible, streamlining design, development and manufacturing processes.

‘Digital design’ combines research insight and mechanistic modelling to provide links between raw materials, formulation, manufacturing processes and drug product quality. It spans all operations, processes and procedures during the development and manufacture of medicines, and their in vivo application.

ADDoPT draws on the expertise of UK technology and academic leaders in the field of digital design concepts including Perceptive Engineering, which has specific expertise in data-driven process modelling, monitoring, predictive control and optimisation.  This expertise and experience will be applied to industrial case studies provided by the four major pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb) within the consortium. A key objective is to achieve better design and scale-up for robust products and processes through more targeted future experimentation and better understanding of risk.

ADDoPT Project Lead Sean Bermingham of Process Systems Enterprise Limited said: “By building on UK excellence in process modelling, optimisation and control, we can give UK pharmaceutical development and manufacturing a genuine competitive advantage in this globally significant sector.”