Professor Alastair Florence

Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences

Personal statement

Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (CMAC) and associated 45 PhD Doctoral Training Centre. Leads the new world-class CMAC National Facility within the Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) at the University of Strathclyde offering access to academic and industrial users to state-of-the art processing, analysis and characterisations facilties and support. Expertise in crystallisation and physical form control and characterisation of pharmaceuticals spanning polymorphism, solvate, co-crystal and salt formation and studies of amorphous systems. Extensive experience in the formation of pharmaceutical particles in continuous processes using a range of technologies as part of the CMAC programme. Interests also in the development and application of new technologies to control and monitor crystallisation and pharmaceutical solids.

Approaches for the characterisation of particles are also widely used and physical analysis of crystalline pharmaceuticals with a focus on the influence of crystallisation processes on structure and critical pharmaceutically relevant attributes that dictates product performance. Exploitation of X-ray powder diffraction techniques for phase identification, structure determination from powder diffraction data and in-situ phase surveys including local order using variable-temperature X-ray powder diffraction are key areas.

Has published over 120 peer reviewed research papers in these areas and currently supervises a large multidisciplinary research group including pharmacists, chemists and chemical engineers.

Prizes and awards

Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain Conference Science Medal: Recipient; 9/2004

more prizes and awards

Publications

Improving the prediction of multi-component tablet properties from pure component parameters: Jolliffe Hikaru Graeme, Papathanasiou Foteini, Prasad Elke, Halbert Gavin, Robertson John, Brown Cameron, Florence Alastair; Computer Aided Chemical Engineering , pp. 883-888 (2019)
Unconventional ultra scale-down techniques for active pharmaceutical ingredient filtration and size reduction: Ojo EO, Rayat A, Price CJ, Brown CJ, Hoare M, Johnston A, Florence AJ; 50th Annual Conference of the British Association of Crystal Growth, pp. 88 (2019)
Oxcarbazepine form III : observation of twisted habit in crystals of an elusive pharmaceutical polymorph: Polyzois H, Guo R, Warzecha M, Price S L , Florence AJ; 50th Annual Conference of the British Association of Crystal Growth, pp. 69 (2019)
Development of a hot-melt extrusion (HME) process to produce drug loaded Affinisol™ 15LV filaments for Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) 3D printing: Prasad Elke, Islam Muhammad T, Goodwin Daniel J, Megarry Andrew J, Halbert Gavin W, Florence Alastair J, Robertson John; Additive Manufacturing Vol 29 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2019.06.027
Polymorph screening studies of oxcarbazepine : twisted habit in crystals of the elusive form III: Polyzois H, Guo R, Warzecha M, Price S L, Florence A; Gordon Research Conference on Crystal Growth and Assembly (2019)
Engineering of acetaminophen particle attributes using a wet milling crystallisation platform: Ahmed Bilal, Brown Cameron J, McGlone Thomas, Bowering Deborah L, Sefcik Jan, Florence Alastair J; International Journal of Pharmaceutics Vol 554, pp. 201-211 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpharm.2018.10.073

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Professional activities

Gordon Research Conference on Crystal Growth and Assembly: Invited speaker; 23/6/2019
Centre for International Manufacturing, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge: Visiting researcher; 21/6/2019
MMIP Annual Conference: Participant; 20/6/2019
EPSRC Hub Directors Meeting (Event): Member; 11/6/2019
Continuous Manufacturing Research: Progress & Pitfalls: Speaker; 26/3/2019
Made Smarter for the Process Industries Workshop: Participant; 8/3/2019

more professional activities

Projects

Pressure-dependent In-Situ Monitoring of Granular Materials: Florence, Alastair (Principal Investigator) Halbert, Gavin (Co-investigator) Markl, Daniel (Co-investigator) McArthur, Stephen (Co-investigator) Nordon, Alison (Co-investigator) Oswald, Iain (Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2022
Doctoral Training Partnership 2018-19 University of Strathclyde | Johnston, Jenna: Florence, Alastair (Principal Investigator) Halbert, Gavin (Co-investigator) Johnston, Jenna (Research Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2018 - 01-Jan-2022
CMAC Core project 2: Spherical Agglomeration: Florence, Alastair (Principal Investigator); 01-Jan-2018 - 30-Jan-2019
Takeda 2017/18 Proprietary Project: Florence, Alastair (Principal Investigator); 01-Jan-2018 - 30-Jan-2019
ARTICULAR: ARtificial inTelligence for Integrated ICT-enabled pharmaceUticaL mAnufactuRing: Johnston, Blair (Principal Investigator) Florence, Alastair (Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2018 - 30-Jan-2022
CMAC Core project: Impurity Rejection: Florence, Alastair (Principal Investigator) Ter Horst, Joop (Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2017 - 30-Jan-2019

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Address

Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences
Technology Innovation Centre

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