New developments in chemical engineering for the production of drug substances

The pharmaceutical industry is moving towards a profitability gap between increasing costs and decreasing prizes. Finally management has understood that merges and acquisitions, high throughput screening and biotechnology alone will not save the companies earnings. Therefore classical approaches like the optimization of production technologies for drug substances, that might help to increase profitability, are receiving increasing attention. This paper shows how the combination of innovative components will guide the way to very efficient and cost effective production. The first component is the design and manufacturing of production facilities. The second component is a process streamlining of the production process. The key technologies discussed here are process control and mini-plant-technology. For these technologies a short look on future trends is taken.