Imperial College London wins Euro 3m to develop purification technologies for API
A consortium led by the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London was one of only 68 proposals selected from 905 submissions for funding by the European Commission as a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) under the FP7 People programme.
A consortium led by the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London was one of only 68 proposals selected from 905 submissions for funding by the European Commission as a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) under the FP7 People programme.
The NEMOPUR (New Molecular Purification Technologies for Pharmaceuticals Production) ITN will focus on the removal of organic impurities from API production.
New solvent resistant membranes with improved chemical stability and better controlled cut-off properties, novel molecularly imprinted polymers with readily scalable production chemistries, and composite molecularly imprinted film – macroporous support membranes – will be developed by chemical engineers from Imperial College London (GB). They will work with the Institute on Membrane Technology (Italy), chemists from Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), and membrane separation experts at Membrane Extraction Technology (UK), and molecularly imprinted polymer developers MIP Technologies (Sweden).
API producers and pharmaceutical manufacturers Hovione (Portugal), Lonza (Switzerland), UCB (Belgium) and GSK (GB) will implement these groundbreaking techniques.
The funding will be used to support a mixture of early stage and experienced researchers employed across all the partners in the consortium, with six early stage researchers based at the universities and six at the industrial partners.
The NEMOPUR research programme will focus on: development of OSN membranes; creation of novel MIP materials that can be used in industrial processes; and MIP film composite membranes which will be stable in organic solvents.