Process Systems Enterprise: Life Sciences to Top Bill at 2012 Advanced Process Modelling Forum

Life Sciences will be a strong feature of this week´s Advanced Process Modelling Forum in London, with presentations from Pfizer, Eli Lilly, GSK, TNO, the Rutgers University ERC-SOPS consortium and Imperial College London.

Ravi Shanker, Senior Research Fellow at Pfizer, will deliver the keynote on Pfizer´s vision for Systems-based Pharmaceutics, a revolutionary model-based approach for optimising drug manufacturing by taking a holistic view that encompasses both biological effects in the human body and drug process and product engineering.

The forum, aimed at senior business and technology decision makers in process industries such as pharmaceuticals, oil & gas, power generation, chemicals, petrochemicals, food and minerals & mining, is a key event for process industry companies focused on creating sustainable value through the application of high-accuracy predictive modelling. It is organised by Process Systems Enterprise (PSE), a leading supplier of Advanced Process Modelling technology and services.

In a dedicated Life Sciences session, GSK, Eli Lilly, TNO, Rutgers University and Imperial College will present the application of model-based techniques to enhance manufacturing process design and scale-up, optimise operations, accelerate process innovation and manage new technology risk, with a focus on laboratory-to-industrial-process workflows for reducing time-to-market for new developments.

Other companies presenting include Shell, where XTL technology manager Jan van Schijndel will deliver the Oil & Gas and Petrochemicals keynote on Shell´s gas-to-liquid (GTL) developments in Qatar, plus SABIC, SASOL, Süd-Chemie, Sulzer Chemtech and the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

Organiser Mark Matzopoulos, PSE´s COO, says "advanced process modelling is about using predictive models to explore the design space rapidly, reduce uncertainty and make better, faster and safer decisions. Traditionally this has been the preserve of more "˜conventional process´ industries such as Oil & Gas, but we have a very strong Life Sciences element at this year´s Forum. Expect some exciting announcements in this area."

Pharma companies are adopting the technology rapidly to accelerate value creation as part of Quality-by-Design (QbD) approaches, in particular by facilitating the move from batch to continuous processing and optimising solids process design and operation.