The Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre partners with Pfizer to transform the formulation of oral solid dosage medicines

CPI has today announced an agreement with Pfizer, making it the newest partner of the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre collaboration. The partnership will enable the Centre to draw upon Pfizer’s expertise within the pharmaceutical sector to help address key challenges and maximise 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, with funding provided by Scottish Enterprise and UK Research and Innovation. The Centre aims to advance emergent and disruptive technologies through a series of flagship ‘Grand Challenge’ projects to increase productivity and patient outcomes in the pharmaceutical industry. 

The new partnership with Pfizer will focus on 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. 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. 

As a partner in the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre collaboration, Pfizer will be providing data, expert skill and knowledge of continuous mixing technology. Pfizer’s contributions to Grand Challenge 1 will aim to minimise costs and significantly reduce risk by providing vital technical expertise for further development of 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.”