Technology for Continuous Production of Medicines

Course content

Feeding, blending, granulation (wet and dry), and tableting are the basic process steps for the production of a tablet. In this course, you will learn about advanced high-speed technologies that enable the production of medicines via continuous processes that are controlled in real-time.

Learning goals

• You will learn why continuous manufacturing can give you huge advantages when establishing a production process.
• We will discuss the different paradigms of batch and continuous manufacturing.
• The basic flow concepts in continuous production will be explained and demonstrated with examples.
• The residence time and its distribution are essential concepts in continuous production; they will be explained in detail. Also, we will introduce methods how to measure the residence time distribution.
• We will discuss the three main continuous manufacturing routes; direct-compaction, dry granulation, and wet-granulation.
• Material and process properties influence each other. This interaction will be discussed by considering critical material attributes and critical process parameters.
• You will learn to understand the fundamentals of a control strategy based on different process control options.
• Quality monitoring and quality control aspects in manufacturing and process design will be explained.

Course schedule

There are 5 main chapters in this course:

• Chapter 1: Welcome to the World of Pharmaceutical Engineering

This chapter gives an introduction about what you will learn in the course.

• Chapter 2: Continuous Manufacturing Basics

Continuous manufacturing is very different from conventional batch manufacturing, which you might be familiar with if you had previously worked in the pharmaceutical field.

For us, it is important that you really understand the difference in the workflow. Therefore, we provided an overview of all relevant information.

• Chapter 3: Continuous Lines for Solid Oral Dosage Forms

Now that you have learned how a continuous manufacturing line can be designed and what flow patterns dominate the flow inside the equipment, we can start looking in detail at the technologies.

• Chapter 4: Control Strategy

This chapter will introduce the two main topics typically covered by a control strategy: quality control and process control. Both concepts are specifically relevant in continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing lines.

• Chapter 5: Continuous Unit Operations

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of feeding and blending, two of the most important process steps in continuous manufacturing.

For actively participating in the course you will receive an automatic certificate which includes your name, the course name as well as the completed lessons. We want to point out that this certificate merely confirms that you answered at least 75% of the self-assessment questions correctly.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons - 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Additional content

Discussion

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