The Role of Physical Sciences during Drug Product Development

The process for developing drug delivery systems has evolved over the past two decades with more scientific rigor, involving a collaboration of various fields, i.e., biology, chemistry, engineering, and pharmaceutics.

Drug products, also commonly known in the pharmaceutical industry as formulations or "dosage forms", are used for administering the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) for purposes of assessing safety in preclinical models, early- to late-phase human clinical trials, and for routine clinical/commercial use.

During this free webinar, the speakers will cover a holistic overview of different stages of small molecule drug development, specifically focusing on physical and physico-chemical aspects that play a key role during the development of a drug products.

While chemical properties like assay, impurities and their possibly toxic nature are evidently of utmost importance for drug efficacy and safety, some commonly less known aspects of drug development are discussed.

It will be illustrated how the solid state of an active compound has a direct impact on its stability and bioavailability as well as the impact of good understanding of the physical properties of the ingredients, used in the formulation, on performance of powder processes and drug products in the patients.

About our two key Speakers :

Luc Aerts : Head Solid State and Materials Science at UCB Pharma

Luc has finished his PhD in 1992 at the Catholic University of Leuven (B) in physical chemistry on phase behaviour of polymer-solvent systems.

After his PhD he went to industry and took research positions in different sectors, be it always from a physico-chemical perspective with an emphasis on thermodynamics, thermal behavior, rheology and polymorphism.

Starting off in the plastics area, he shifted to the food ingredients industry and then joined UCB Pharma in 2008. He is now heading the Solid State and Material Science group, which is contributing to the development of new small molecule drugs and also provides support in case of manufacturing issues.

Mehrdad Pasha : Powder Expert at UCB Pharma

Mehrdad has completed his PhD degree in Chemical and Process Engineering from University of Leeds , UK in 2015. Before joining UCB as Powder Expert, he worked as research fellow and consultant at the University of Leeds for a period of 5 years.

His research and activities is focused primarily on establishing a relationship between microscopic and macroscopic properties and phenomena of particulate systems. His expertise are in single particle and bulk powder characterization, powder flow, segregation/mixing, and coating, using state of the art experimental techniques and computational approaches (e.g. Discrete Element Method).

Mehrdad has won several international prizes including: Award of Excellence in Modelling and Simulation at World Congress on Particle Technology, Brian Scarlet Award at Annual Meeting of International Fine Particle Research Institute.