The pharmaceutical or drug manufacturing industry, like many industries these days, need technological innovations that would allow it to make its processes safer, more efficient, and economical. When coupled with sound scientific efforts and good manufacturing procedures, these tech innovations can facilitate the manufacturing of highly-engineered drugs to cure serious illnesses that affect millions of people around the world. As the race for the COVID-19 vaccine rages on, pharmaceutical companies across the world sure need some tech innovations to help them develop a potential cure for the deadly virus.
Fortunately, technology has always been a human discipline that never fails to give. During the last few years, the drug manufacturing industry has had its fair share of groundbreaking instruments that allowed it to improve its drug production capabilities.
Here are some of the most recent tech innovations that are revolutionizing today’s pharmaceutical industry:
- In-vivo predictive instruments. These modern tech products allow drug manufacturers to fully understand and make a timely prediction on how the drugs they’re working on can impact absorption and release. There are some notable products belonging to this category of pharmaceutical tools, such as several Pion instruments that offer accurate and timely predictive capacity in terms of absorption, permeability, and solubility, among other things. If you want to make your drug manufacturing processes more intuitive and accurate, then these instruments should be included in your shopping list.
- Interconnected digital operations center. In what can be considered a truly futuristic instrument, big-ticket pharmaceutical company Pfizer has been spearheading digital transformation in its manufacturing plants. The pharma giant is laying down the infrastructure needed to link its plants together to enable accurate and real-time data sharing to help workers and decision-makers in each plant make the right decisions the very first time. With an interconnected digital operations center, processes in the drug manufacturing plants become not only safer and more intuitive but more efficient as well.
- PhysChem analysis instruments. PhysChem or physical chemistry analysis in drug manufacturing is the process of establishing the core properties of compounds that are commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. Accordingly, there have been numerous PhysChem analysis instruments that were developed to cover LogP and LogD, solubility, ionization, permeability, and pKa — critical processes involved in drug manufacturing and development. With these PhysChem analysis instruments, it’s possible to make an accurate determination of the specific chemical and physical properties of the compounds that make up the drugs under development.
- Dissolution analysis tools. Dissolution analysis involves different techniques such as biorelevant (in-vivo), biphasic, and compendial (fiber optic). With the different dissolution analysis tools and accessories that are available in the market, drug manufacturers can effectively develop different drug products in a cost-efficient and timely manner. These tech instruments are essentially making the dissolution analysis phase in drug development incredibly faster while conserving limited and costly resources in manufacturing plants.
- Surface imaging tool and dissolution software. A surface imaging tool used in the dissolution process helps scientists monitor API dissolution as it happens and records the entire process for use in future analysis. A dissolution software, meanwhile, was the product of the hard work of developers who wanted to make data available across multiple dissolution platforms. This feature makes data-sharing and access to dissolution information possible regardless of a scientist’s or researcher’s location. This specific technological instrument makes collaborative work among drug developers in different manufacturing plants an easy thing to achieve.
Which of these tech instruments does your manufacturing plant have? What is your experience in using them? Are they worth the money that you have invested? With these tech innovations, countless lives were saved and made convenient and safer, which ultimately enhanced peoples’ quality of life.