DMU teams up with UCL on a PhD project funded by the EPSRC

Biopharmaceutical companies are using freeze-drying in order to optimise the shelf-life of formulated biological drug  products (antibodies, blood products, vaccines etc.). However, the current development strategies for product formulation & production scale‑up are disjointed and based on a limited design space (few formulations & a narrow range of process parameters investigated). Most importantly, optimisation of formulation & process are not executed concurrently, which is a critical weakness. This project will develop applications for scalable process analytical technologies, based on through vial impedance spectroscopy and will correlate the characteristics of the protein solution during freeze-drying with various biophysical tests for protein stability.

Our successful PhD candidate, Mr Anand Vadesa, will be working with  Prof. Geoff Smith in De Montfort University’s Pharmaceutical Technologies Group and Prof. Paul Dalby (Department of Biochemical Engineering, University College London) in the EPSRC Future Targeted Healthcare Manufacturing Hub on a project entitled “Scale Equivalence in the Freeze-drying of Biopharmaceuticals: The Drive Towards Process Efficiency and Protein Stability”. Funding for the project comes from UCLs’ CDT for Innovative Manufacturing in Emergent Macromolecular Therapies.