Enhancing medicine manufacturing through digitalisation

A new digital collaboration is set to take advantage of a manufacturing facility model featuring innovative technologies, accelerating how fast new medicines are made. The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), academia, and the pharma industry will work together to develop the model which will harness artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies could enable patients to access advanced treatments up to one year faster, CPI stated.

The aim is to support manufacturers to be adaptable during production scale up and navigate the balance between medicine demand and supply. According to CPI, the digital manufacturing technologies could facilitate a “50 percent increase in productivity…[and] reduce operational costs by up to 30 percent”.

Driving digitalisation in manufacturing

“By providing pharma companies with a real-life replicable model of a cloud-first manufacturing facility, we will drive forward the digital capability of pharma manufacturers…We need to engage across pharma manufacturers of all scales if we are to realise the true potential of digitising medicines manufacturing,” Dave Berry, Director of Digital Business Systems at CPI commented.

The Digital Membership includes companies such as GSK, AstraZeneca, The National Physical Laboratory, The University of Cambridge, Quotient Sciences, The University of Strathclyde and Thermo Fisher.

“This new collaboration is a perfect example of industry, academia and government working together to drive transformative change by employing new technologies in an innovative way that will introduce new medicines into clinical use in a faster, more sustainable, and cost-effective manner,” remarked Professor Duncan Graham, Associate Principal and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Strathclyde.

CPI highlighted that as part of a consortium, earlier in 2024, 13 partners found that collaboration enabled “faster, more effective digitalisation” within manufacturing.

Creating “digital architectures that track data from the ground up” ensured that information was accessible to the appropriate people or systems to “produce real-time data to improve the speed of decision-making.” Specifically, this involved creating standardised digital solutions tailored for each step of medicine development, CPI added.

Planning ahead

Into its second year in 2024, members of the digital collaboration will focus on tackling supply chain challenges and improving digital manufacturing for various new treatments, CPI shared. These include therapies such RNA vaccines and cell and gene therapies.

This next phase will be carried out mainly at CPI’s Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre.