Industrial/academic crystallisation project receives £709K grant

Grant

A project to improve crystallisation technology in drug manufacturing has received £709,000 funding from the Scottish Funding Council, under its Demand-led Knowledge Exchange SPIRIT scheme.

The project will involve a collaboration between Glasgow, Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt universities, together with a range of SMEs and multinational companies including GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Schering-Plough, Fujifilm, NiTech and Warwick International.

More than 80 per cent of pharmaceutical products and 60 per cent of fine and specialty chemical products are crystalline in form. However, current methods of making these crystalline forms is expensive and inefficient and the quality is difficult to control.

The researchers hope to apply a new method of making the crystals that will reduce environmental impact by 40-90 per cent, reduce costs by 25 to 60 per cent and increase quality control, moving from stirred batch vessels, to a continuous flow production technique.

Chick Wilson, Head of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and leader of the SPIRIT project, said, “New processes based on continuous crystallisation methodologies could have major economic and environmental impacts. This project will offer crucial academic input to the development of platform solutions applying crystallisation science to manufacturing, geared directly at the need of end-users.”

Sandy Dobbie, chair of Chemical Sciences Scotland, said the project is an important development for the chemical sciences in Scotland and across the world. “This project is just the beginning: what we are seeing here is multi-national organisations with bases in Scotland engaging with several of our universities and our SMEs, explaining what they need to take their business to another level, and each group then working together to find the optimum solution to these universal problems.”

The grant is part of a larger €8.1 million funding announcement made by the Scottish government to support university and industry partnerships.

Announcing the funding, Michael Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, said, “Universities have an important role to play in helping us emerge strongly from the current economic downturn. As well as ensuring our people have the skills they need as individuals and to grow our economy, they are also businesses in their own right, generating around £2 billion a year.”