Pfizer joins Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre to improve formulation

Pfizer has joined the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre as its latest partner to help improve efficiency within the medicines supply chain.

The Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre is a collaboration between CPI, the University of Strathclyde and founding industry partners GSK and AstraZeneca. It’s aiming to help bring to market emerging technologies that can increase productivity and patient outcomes in the pharmaceutical industry. 

The new partnership with Pfizer will focus on the collaboration’s Grand Challenge 1, which aims to develop an innovative continuous direct compression (CDC) platform enabling oral solid dosage medicines to be formulated more robustly and efficiently. 

The CDC platform will feature a digital twin and data predictor model to allow for the modelling of processes in a digital space. It’s hoped that this capability will improve efficiency and significantly cut down the quantity of starting materials needed to optimise formulations with the aim of enabling companies to ultimately develop formulations faster and at reduced cost. 

Pfizer will provide data, expertise and knowledge of continuous mixing technology that can help minimise costs and reduce the development risks associated with the digital twin and data predictor model for the CDC platform.

Dave Tudor, managing director at the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, said: "We are extremely proud to be working with Pfizer and look forward to drawing on its wealth of expertise in the pharmaceutical industry. This partnership will help to further develop the CDC platform as part of Grand Challenge 1, leading to reduced materials requirements and lower costs for the end-user.”

Brian Henry, vice president, Drug Product Design, at Pfizer, said: "We are excited to begin our partnership with the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre to support the delivery of Grand Challenge 1. Through the support of Pfizer’s Emerging Science Fund, we believe we can utilise our collective knowledge to build predictive models for continuous tablet manufacturing, with the goal of enhancing our ability to accelerate the drug development process and help deliver breakthroughs that change patients’ lives."