The National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing

Seminar

The National Center for therapeutics manufacturing

The National Center for therapeutics manufacturing is an initiative that is trying to bridge the gap between synthesizing a drug and its commercial manufacture. In this era of biotechnology, there has been a significant progress in terms of drug development for various diseases that have been challenging mankind. However, the process of taking the drug from the design stage (or lab scale) to the customer is an arduous one to say the least. There are quite a number of technical difficulties that need to be overcome before commissioning a drug for large scale production. The National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing (NCTM) is a first-in-class, flexible-by-design, bio-pharmaceutical research, development, training, and production facility within the Texas Engineering Experiment Station. The goal of the NCTM is to provide rapid, cost-effective, FDA-compliant, and scalable manufacturing that will enable an array of new products to enter clinical trials. NCTM also hopes to combat bio terrorism.

As mentioned earlier, there are several challenges in commercial manufacturing of therapeutics. A typical case in point would be egg based vaccine production. Egg based vaccines are used for combating some of the most deadly viruses such as the H1N1 virus. Until recently the egg supply has been organized for supporting seasonal vaccine production. However the pandemic could break out when there is no supply of eggs. By the time the vaccine is produced the pandemic could go out of control. This is one of the many challenges that could be solved by the principles used in Industrial and Systems engineering.

There are several other important challenges in this regard. Some of them being

Transfer of materials in a sterile environment

Improvement of waste collection systems

Improvement in delivery of vaccine to patient

Single use and disposable equipment for batch production

Quality management and supply chain of finished vaccines.

Overall, the talk clearly presented the need for solutions that could be provided by Industrial Engineers so as to facilitate the manufacture of vaccines and