Substantial support is provided by industry partners that include GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Fujifilm, British Salt, Croda International plc, Genzyme Ltd, NiTech Solutions, Phoenix Chemicals and Solid Form Solutions Ltd.  Possibly room for Renishaw Diagnostic equipment too.

Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre for revolutionising pharmaceuticals and other chemicals manufacture  is officially launched today.

The collaborative initiative involving leading academics and industrialists, led by Strathclyde, is seeking quicker, more effective and sustainable methods of manufacturing products such as medicines, foodstuffs, dyes, pigments and nanomaterials.

Strathclyde has also invested a further £500,000 in a new multidisciplinary continuous processing lab, due to open this summer, and will bring together existing teams at the University and house a suite of state-of-the-art reactor devices for continuous manufacturing and crystallisation.

The research team is to develop a better understanding of the way products form and improve control, using new processes for manufacturing. Chemical, pharmaceutical sectors sales are worth £113bn to UK economy annually. The Centre will improve and accelerate production of a broad range of products. Delivering better control over the crystallisation process, researchers create opportunities for innovation in products such as pharmaceuticals.

Continuous manufacture to replace batch
Right: Baccelerator for continous bacteria growth.
The new Centre allows lead research teams working together on technologies that ensure medicines and other materials can be produced with continuous manufacture approaches, rather than using traditional batch methods.

Key to this is developing crystallisation technologies that deliver better control and more efficient use of materials and resources, offering the opportunity to reduce running costs and energy requirement by  up to 60% and 70% respectively.

Professor Alastair Florence, of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, is director of the new Centre.

“This unique national Centre will provide a focus for early stage engineering and physical sciences research that will feed through directly to the activities of Technology and Innovation Centres (TIC) and industry, making a radical and much-needed impact on the production of many different high-value products. 

"By working together in this way, the UK research community will contribute to the competitiveness of companies across a variety of important sectors  including pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, dyes & pigments, energy, food and drink.
 
“We will carry out an innovative programme of research [ensuring] that the exciting new research programme is targeted to areas of real national need. Research carried out..will benefit patients through better medicines, more efficiently produced, at lower cost and more sustainably.

Reworking medicine drug package
“In addition to improving the way drug substances are produced..alternative manufacture approaches [explore] the medicines in which drugs are delivered to patients.  This could include alternatives to the traditional tablet that are also safe and effective but are more straightforward to make.”

The Centre, part of a £5m investment by EPSRC in nine new centres is officially launched today. It follows launch of the £89m Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) at Strathclyde, a world-leading centre for transforming the way universities, business and industry collaborate to bring global competitive advantage to Scotland.