MIT to Research Manufacturing Technologies for Novartis

Novartis will fund a $65 million joint-research program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aimed at developing new technologies to improve pharmaceutical manufacturing efficiencies.

The 10-year research program will focus on changing current pharmaceutical production methods from a batch-based system to a continuous manufacturing process, Novartis and MIT said.

Bernhardt Trout, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT, said a major goal of the program is to eliminate the development time of manufacturing process scale-up for new drugs.

By integrating the manufacturing process in one operation, from active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacture to finished-dose production, scale-up times and manufacturing shutdowns and startups could be reduced.

Another benefit of the program includes the possibility of reducing the number of excipients used in production and more efficient utilization of raw materials, Trout said.

Integrating API and finished-dose production will require new technologies and equipment. Under the joint-research program, MIT will develop the technologies on a small scale during the first five years of the project, then transfer the technology and process to a Novartis facility for large-scale production, Trout said.