ChBE Seminar - Dr. Marianthi Lerapetritou: A Systems Perspective for Advancing Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Armour College of Engineering's Chemical and Biological Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Marianthi Lerapetritou, Professor and Chair of Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University, to present her lecture, A Systems Perspective for Advancing Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.
Abstract
The pharmaceutical industry is a global business sector with $1 trillion annual sales focused on performance-based products designed to address the healthcare needs of the world’s population. The industry has been recently experiencing a number of important changes in its business environment that are driving efforts to reduce overall cost while also improving product quality. While for decades pharmaceutical companies relied in outdated manufacturing facilities while investing heavily in drug discovery, the last decade they are looking for substantial investments in manufacturing upgrades. One of the most pronounced shifts is towards continuous manufacturing. The incentives for this transformation of pharmaceutical manufacturing and the reasons behind the timing of the change will be outlined in this talk.
To enable this change the pharmaceutical industry has to build the necessary expertise and skills to design and effectively operate the new kind of production, and support the paradigm shift in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Continuous production requires detailed process understanding in terms of the evolution of all critical material properties as a function of its operating parameters and environmental conditions. Once process knowledge is translated into models, process systems engineering tools allows the design, analysis and optimization of continuous integrated processes. The major challenges to achieve this goal, and highlights of the work that has been performed in our lab in the recent years to address these problems will also be covered in the talk.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou is Professor and Department Chair, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University. She received her PhD from Imperial College, London, UK. Her research interests include Process Operations Optimization, Modeling, Optimization and Control of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, and Integration of Uncertainty in Process Design and Operations. She has over 300 research publications. Dr. Ierapetritou is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, and an Outstanding Faculty Award, School of Engineering, Rutgers University, and she is a Fellow of AICHE.