Continuous Manufacturing: A tide in the affairs of men

A lot of the good 'flow' puns and quotations are already well used by us and others.  However, the words of Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar do seem quite apt for the current momentum behind continuous manufacturing / aka 'flow chemistry'.

Scale-up Systems was delighted to attend Flow Chemistry III in Cambridge, UK, March 14-16, where an international group of practitioners from academia, industry and continuous reactor vendors assembled to share state-of-the-art work in this area.

Numerous university researchers, including Prof. Oliver Kappe of Karl-Franzens University, talked about how this technology is allowing them to work in conditions not possible with traditional round bottom flasks and to approach new chemistries in this way.  While industrial speakers mainly concentrated on the benefits and practicalities of operating continuously.  These ranged from Jesus Alcazar of Jannsen who presented their roll-out of “Flow Chemistry as a tool for Drug Discovery” through to Malcolm Berry who’s plenary detailed GSK’s journey in “Industrialisation of API Continuous Processing, from Lab to Factory.  What have we learnt along the way?” 

A strong take home for Scale-up Systems was an oft-repeated message that DynoChem and reaction kinetics are key tools for implementation of Continuous Manufacturing of APIs.   Prof Frans Muller of Leeds University made a presentation that covered in detail how kinetic motifs can be used to explore the Design Space with limited experimental data and this message was echoed by Malcolm Berry who noted that a wealth of process knowledge was obtained with a kinetic model that would not have been possible via a DoE approach.

You can find relevant tools in our online library with this link.  Watch out for a new utility coming shortly for modeling a sequence of unit operations based on residence time distribution models.