Foresight Fellowship in Manufacturing: Analytical technologies in continuous and additive manufacturing

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This Fellowship application seeks to accelerate the uptake of continuous and additive manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry. Continuous manufacturing is widely used in many sectors, where just-in-time protocols are common. Additive manufacturing, encompassing 3D-printing, has received much attention recently as printers have become commercially available. Additive manufacturing is a very flexible process and is currently used predominantly for prototype manufacture, enabling personalisation of products. However, scaling-up additive manufacturing processes is challenging and the vision of scales-out (multiple printers or print heads) is often suggested. In contrast, continuous manufacturing processes offer a more direct route to scale-up and are also flexible; the same production line can be used to manufacture a number of different products. However quality assurance protocols in continuous manufacturing are challenging.Many reasons are given for the pharmaceutical industry not adopting the latest manufacturing technologies, chief among these are regulatory concerns. This is in part due to innate conservatism from the regulators (though the FDA is encouraging change) but also due to a lack of analytical technologies being integrated with the continuous manufacturing production lines to ensure product quality. It is these analytical challenges that this Fellowship seeks to address.