Interphex hints at a manufacturing revolution

The Interphex trade show, held in New York City this week, brought the usual showcase of pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment—everything from safety boot removers to stainless steel process vessels and robotic pill counters. But the overarching theme at the big show was “small.”

Moments after the exhibit floor opened, Leroy Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow, gave a presentation on how robotics, digital coding, cloud computing, and three-dimensional printing will converge in small machines that can make dosage-form drugs on demand.

“It will be like Uber for chemistry,” Cronin said, comparing the future of drug manufacturing to the transportation app. “You will call drugs up as needed.” He pointed to music downloads. “We don’t buy vinyl anymore; we buy code. The transformation into music occurs at our speakers.”

Such a system will face regulatory barriers and other formidable resistance. But advances in personalized medicine and the need to supply drugs to small populations in remote regions will propel the trend toward tabletop manufacturing, Cronin said.

Meaningful, if less dramatic, downsizing has already occurred in biologic drug manufacturing, where the deployment of disposable plastic bag reactors has exploded since the technique debuted at the show 10 years ago. The technology significantly decreases the size and cost of manufacturing operations, said Kenneth Clapp Sr., a manager with GE Healthcare’s life sciences division.

Although the tabletop pill making envisioned by Cronin is a long way off, Clapp and others at Interphex agreed that robotics and 3-D printing are separately making headway as the traditionally conservative drug industry begins to streamline how it manufactures.