Siemens AG and GEA announce continuous manufacturing partnership

Global technology company, Siemens AG, and supplier for the food processing industry, GEA, have announced a partnership in an attempt to bring continuous manufacturing to the pharma and life sciences industry.

The two companies intend to offer an integrated continuous tablet manufacturing line to deliver production benefits such as reduced project execution risk and higher quality and cost-effective manufacturing and customer benefits in the form of seamlessly integrated technologies, expertise and support.

The collaboration offers life sciences companies an experienced partner to help them implement continuous manufacturing platforms.

The partnership will take advantage of GEA’s ConsiGma continuous manufacturing platform equipped with a Siemens Automation & Industrial IT solution, including Sipat for PAT Data Management to offer both wet granulation and direct compression in a standard-setting solution for continuous tablet production in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.

GEA’s ConsiGma is a multipurpose platform that has been designed to transfer powder into coated tablets in development, pilot, clinical and production volumes in a single compact unit. The system can perform dosing and mixing of raw materials, wet or dry granulation, drying, tableting, coating and quality control, all in one line. 

Siemens’ Sipat is a scalable and modular software solution that enables companies to extend their PAT-based quality control strategies on a step-by-step basis within the scope of a Quality by Design‑ based approach. With PAT, product development and production processes can be monitored, controlled and optimized by measuring and calculating the Critical-to-Quality Attributes (CQA’s) of the end product in real-time. 

Frans Maas, vice president, APC Pharma Solids, GEA, said: “Amalgamating our state-of-the-art continuous processing technology with Siemens’ automation systems allows us to further support the US Food and Drug Administration’s Pharmaceutical Quality for the 21st Century program and help pharmaceutical companies to adopt continuous manufacturing (CM) technologies and modernize their production infrastructure. Together, our combined experience and expertise will provide significant industry benefits as pharmaceutical manufacturers transition towards continuous manufacturing.”

“The use of CM technologies and inline PAT monitoring is a key driver of building quality by design (QbD) into the complete product lifecycle, from R&D through to manufacturing, with the ultimate aim of getting safer medicines to market in a more efficient and cost-effective way.” said Hartmut Klocker, vice president Market Development Board Pharma.