Postgraduate research opportunities Autonomous MicroScale Manufacture of Oral Solid Dosage Forms

Health systems worldwide are pressed to deliver better medicines to more people with tightening budgets in a more sustainable way. The Centre of Continuous Manufacturing and Advanced Crystallisation (CMAC) is transforming medicines manufacture, development and supply and specifically addressing these major pharmaceutical goals via the use of digital twins, continuous manufacturing and digitally enabled, integrated end-to-end processing (MicroFactories).

This project

This project will be part of the Made Smarter Innovation – Digital Medicines Manufacturing Research Centre (DM2) with a focus on creating a unique autonomous microscale drug product manufacturing and testing system to select formulation and process that result in a stable product with desired critical quality attributes (CQAs). The platform will perform fundamental research 
into resolving the complex, multi-length and
-dimensional material-process-product-performance relationship. Integrating industrial digital technologies (IDTs) will de-risk and accelerate drug product manufacture, dramatically reducing 
development time and raw material/solvents, whilst achieving CQA objectives by self-optimised formulation and process conditions. This will be co-developed with supporting industry partners focussing on 1) tablets (via direct compression) and 2) capsule (via powder fill).

Environment

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic research team based at the University of Strathclyde and working closely with collaborators of the Made Smarter Innovation – Digital Medicines Manufacturing Research Centre (DM2) and the Centre of Continuous Manufacturing and Advanced Crystallisation (CMAC), gain experience of a range of techniques as part of your research. Researchers working on CMAC projects have a great opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in world class facilities, explore academic and industrial collaborations, experience working in industry through placements, and receive multidisciplinary training and mentoring that will help them develop into well-rounded professionals. The structure of a PhD project with CMAC includes a period of initial training and familiarisation with the CMAC’s activities, participation in summer schools, outreach events, mentoring schemes, and supervision from academic and industrial advisers.

The candidate will have access to a dedicated national network of world-class, state-of-the-art facilities, including the £34M UK-RPIF funded CMAC National Facility at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK). In particular for this project, the successful candidate will work with cutting-edge technologies including novel micro-scale manufacturing systems and collaborative robotics.

Further information

The studentship is based on home fees but international candidates can be considered if self-funds can be used to top-up.