‘RiFTMaP’ project to advance pharmaceutical manufacturing

The three-year, EPSRC-funded project, named ‘Right First Time Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals’ (RiFTMaP), will begin this September and is a collaborative effort between Sheffield, UCL and Strathclyde University, and Purdue University in the USA. 

Professor Jim Litster, vice president and head of the Faculty of Engineering at Sheffield University, explained that the project’s overall mission is to bring a process systems engineering approach to continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing, resulting in benefits such as reduced time-to-market for products, reduced waste, increased resilience and reduced cost. 

“Ultimately, we want to support a vibrant and sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in both the UK and the USA,” he told The Engineer. “Right-first-time comes from the idea that if we put together a continuous manufacturing plant, it has a lot of different advantages in terms of efficiency and product quality, but it’s different from the traditional approach of the pharmaceutical industry which is batch processing, and a lot of what you'd call quality by testing.”