I have always had a great interest in Science and Engineering because of the impacts that both of these have on our daily lives. Working in pharmaceutical secondary manufacturing brings together both disciplines.   Secondary manufacturing focuses on the conversion of the active drugs into products suitable for administration.   Combining pilot plant and modelling resarch, we work on the introduction of continuous technology instead to traditional batch equipment.   Transition to continuous is challenging but it will reduce the time of production of the drugs besides to create safer and cheaper drugs .

My new role takes place at the new Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre (MMIC) , where I am part of a team focused in the development a continuous direct compression (CDC) platform. CDC is a continuous manufacturing process that allows much greater process control than traditional batch-type pharmaceutical manufacturing methods. Its advantages include rapid production of formulations at a range of scales and also shorter optimisation times compared to batch-type processes.   In my role, I will also help to develop a digitally-twinned CDC platform that allows us to understand and optimise the formulation process in digital space. The hope is that this reduces the amount of starting materials needed for optimisation and reduce the overall cost of the technology for the end-user.