An Easy Pill to Swallow: Automation is Transforming the Pharmaceutical Industry

Every disease is different – and the medications that treat them vary just as widely. Flip through any magazine or watch a 30-minute episode’s worth of TV commercials and you’ll see them: new-generation prescription drugs with complicated names and incredible testimonials from the patients they’re helping. Powered by innovation, the landscape of medication is changing rapidly.

Emerson’s automation technology — the same type of technology that powers process manufacturing across industries — is helping companies bring life-changing pharmaceuticals to market, faster and safer than ever before. When you stop to consider that more than half of Americans take daily prescriptions, the impact of getting needed medications to market faster is evident.

New Medicines

Advances in life sciences have enabled the introduction of new medicines capable of treating a wide range of serious diseases in unexpected ways. Cancers, diabetes, hepatitis, autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and other serious afflictions are all yielding to “biologics,” a relatively new category of immunotherapy for patients. These new therapies are changing lives — providing relief for patients seeking help for conditions that negatively impact their health and quality of life.

The impact of these medications is undeniable — as is the complexity of the manufacturing process required to make them a reality. The new biologic medications have different and more complex requirements than traditional medications, which means that development of the manufacturing process can be a challenge.

Changing the Process

Emerson is transforming the manufacturing development process, from the research lab to the production facility. Breakthroughs were previously made by researchers in the lab, using lab equipment, which were then interpreted, translated and scaled-up for the production floor. This multistep process is slow and inefficient, making it difficult to move products into large-scale manufacturing.

Now, thanks to advanced manufacturing and our scalable DeltaV systems, researchers in the lab are developing drugs with the same equipment and automation technology that will be used to commercially manufacture the drugs, providing crucial insights into how to make the medications efficiently. By implementing our automation and controls technology in the lab and on the manufacturing floor, we help enable highly precise and flexible manufacturing capacity at a lower capital cost, which also leads to easier submissions and approvals by global regulatory agencies.

Single-use, a recent trend in pharmaceutical manufacturing, makes it possible for companies to more efficiently switch production from one medication to another, preparing a production line in a few hours, compared to a few days with more traditional manufacturing methods.

While the benefits of efficiency cannot be overstated, the transformed pharmaceutical manufacturing processes are having an even bigger impact on a global scale. Automation empowers flexible manufacturing suites, which can be used to produce small quantities of medicines to respond to a localized crisis (such as an ebola or other epidemic). This scalable technology can also address the issue of “orphan” medications — an industry term for medicines that treat a tiny subset of the population and are not profitable to produce on a large scale.

These new approaches to manufacturing, powered by automation, make it possible to create needed medicines quickly, reliably, safely and economically, while minimizing capital equipment investments.

The pharmaceutical industry is changing — and at Emerson, we see ourselves empowering that change, one life-saving innovation at a time.