Solvent Mixtures Design and Optimisation of Purification Processes in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Abstract

Solvent mixtures play an important role throughout the manufacturing of pharmaceutical and chemical products. Their extensive use across production processes (e.g. synthesis, separation and purification) has major impacts on overall process efficiency and final product quality, as well as making solvent selection a key concern from environmental and safety perspectives. In current industrial practice, several critical decisions involved in the design of a process or product, such as the choice of suitable ingredients (e.g., solvents) and process conditions, rely on either heuristic approaches or time-consuming experimental studies. Such trail-and-error practices can often be expensive and are liable to lead to sub-optimal designs that fail to consider the integrated nature of all design decisions. Thus, the development of fast and efficient methodologies to explore all possible options would be an indispensable tool in the design of improved pharmaceutical processes and better chemical products. In this talk, I will present recent advances in systematic methodologies for the design of solvent mixtures used in the purification of pharmaceutical compounds and the design of chemical product formulations. Within the proposed approach, state-of-the-art thermodynamic models are used to integrate property prediction with process modelling, while advanced optimisation techniques are employed to search the vast design space of potential solvents and process conditions and suggest the most promising design options. The methodology is applied to the design of solvent mixtures for the integrated crystallization and isolation of active pharmaceutical ingredients and the design of optimal environmentally friendly adhesive products. This work shows that a comprehensive approach where the optimal chemicals, mixture compositions, and process conditions are identified simultaneously, can lead to improved process efficiency and product performance over conventional designs.

Biography

Dr. Suela Jonuzaj completed her PhD in the area of molecular and mixture design in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. In September 2017, she secured an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship, which provided her with a year of post-doctoral funding; and in October 2018, she joined the CMAC Future Manufacturing Research Hub, where she works on solvent mixture design for the integrated purification processes of pharmaceuticals.

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When: 2nd September, 2020 13:00 PM London
Topic: CPSE Summer Webinar Series: Dr Suela Jonuzaj (CPSE, Imperial College London)

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