Matthew Abel
Contact Info
Office: Bldg. 56-454
Phone: 617-253-0470
Fax: 617-258-6876
Email: mjabel@gmail.com
Education:
B.S. Chemical Engineering, Stanford University
Thesis Title:
Systems Engineering of Continuous Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Research Description:
In order to better understand the relative cost savings associated with continuous manufacturing and to provide a business case for continuous manufacturing adoption, a series of process simulations of continuous and batch manufacturing systems of similar complexity were modeled and compared. These models have demonstrated that capital expenses and operating expenses can be significantly lower for continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing systems. The process simulations were also modified to calculate a total lifecycle continuous manufacturing cost advantage for a pharmaceutical product. The total lifecycle cost models demonstrated even greater cost savings due to continuous manufacturing's greater flexibility of scale. This flexibility makes it possible to use a manufacturing scale system for everything from Phase II clinical trials onwards.
To realize the economic benefits demonstrated in the process simulations, the risk of implementing continuous process systems needs to be reduced. Blending is the key step in pharmaceutical manufacturing that determines product uniformity and is a challenging step to transition from batch to continuous manufacturing. Blender size, process conditions and particle properties have been explored using reduced scale discrete element method models. These models have given novel insight into the flow behavior and mixing performance of continuous blenders. These models have also been used to test and create higher level scaling methods for continuous blending. Ultimately, the true product of this modeling has been improving the design of continuous pharmaceutical blending equipment.