In this talk, Georgia Sanxaridou from CMAC ran us through the ground-breaking and potentially industry disrupting application SIFT-MS on real-time analysis of the drying process in pharmaceutical production.
A key stage of pharmaceutical production is the removal of solvents used to make them. This is done easily enough through the conventional method of heating the ‚cake‘ until the offending parties evaporate.
Traditionally, the only way to find out if and when the heating process had been successful was to stop the process (thereby stopping overall production), take a sample and then analyse it using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, (NMR).
While this process of stop and test ultimately does the job, it comes with significant downsides:
1. There is often unacceptable solvent residues.
2. It takes a long time for the ‘cake’ to dry.
3. The high temperatures can degrade the quality of the overall product.
4. Agglomeration which can critically affect the flow characteristics of the final product.
In simple terms it creates a bottle neck at the solvent analysis stage of production, often stopping operations by half a day. Meaning you have to produce in staggered batches to minimise the effects of stop-start production.
SIFT-MS’s extreme sensitivity gives it an incredibly wide dynamic range and can measure from low parts per billion up to 100s of parts per million concentrations in real-time. Meaning it’s no longer necessary to make product in batches, cook off the solvents until it’s likely they’re gone, analyse a sample, then respond accordingly. Rinse, repeat.
The addition of real-time monitoring to supercritical CO2 extraction opens up the possibility of continuous manufacturing which is a significantly less wasteful and simpler way of doing things.
Read about Georgia’s work here:
http://www.anatune.co.uk/applications/blog/pharmaceutical-production-from-batch-to-continuous-manufacturing/
Read about Days 1 and 2 of the 2019 SIFT-MS Interest Group Meeting here:
http://www.anatune.co.uk/applications/blog/2019-sift-ms-interest-group-meeting-day-1-round-up/
http://www.anatune.co.uk/applications/blog/2019-sift-ms-interest-group-meeting-day-2-round-up/
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