Emerson and IMA Active are collaborating on strategies and software to control continuous manufacturing of oral solid dose pharmaceuticals.
The two companies aim to make it easier for pharmaceutical manufacturers to adopt continuous manufacturing and accelerate patient access by optimising production.
In developing the control strategies, IMA will apply its experience in equipment design, machine integration and process logic to identify optimum performance for essential equipment, while Emerson will couple these performance strategies with its scalable automation technologies and software to deliver robust process monitoring and control, the companies say.
“We appreciate partners able to share our holistic vision of automation. Having a powerful and flexible platform to enable predictive analysis, to speed and simplify integration of the pharma 4.0 ecosystem and with wide data integration capabilities is a requirement,” said Marco Minardi, Automation Manager at IMA Active. “In Emerson, we found a truly common will to achieve these results and an effective user experience that will simplify adoption of continuous manufacturing technology.”
Continuous pharmaceutical processes require process control, monitoring of critical parameters to assure quality attributes, process analytical technology measurements, processing of analytical data, and advanced control techniques. To manage all these critical variables, manufacturers leverage automation technologies to orchestrate production.
The collaboration’s software solution will be designed to detect, predict, and alert the occurrence of adverse production events to improve quality and reduce risk. Emerson’s DeltaV distributed control system will orchestrate the entire oral solid dose continuous manufacturing line, managing control and automation of equipment and subsystems.
“IMA Active is a master in the processes and equipment required for oral solid dose manufacturing,” said Xavier Marchant, VP of Life Sciences at Emerson. “Together, our two companies will create a solution that makes it easier and faster to adopt continuous manufacturing and unlock the highest level of quality at the lowest production cost.”
