Manufacturing Technology and Equipment Prize Goes to GEA Group

GEA was awarded best manufacturing technology and equipment at the 2016 CPhI Pharma Awards for its ConsiGma continuous manufacturing platform. Continuous manufacturing presents a paradigm shift in drug production that meets the industry’s demands for faster product development, reduced costs, improved production economics, and increased manufacturing flexibility.

GEA’s ConsiGma multipurpose platform enables the transfer of powder into coated tablets in development, pilot, clinical, and production volumes in a single compact unit. The system can perform dosing and dry blending of raw materials, wet granulation, drying, tableting, direct compression (going directly from the dry blend to compression), coating, and quality control, all in one line. It can produce liquid-solid blends, granules, and dry blends continuously, using novel inline blending technologies. As a result, there is minimal waste during start-up and shutdown. The batch size is determined by how long the machine is run. Quality is measured throughout the process and as such, contributes to a significant reduction in the overall cost per tablet.

ConsiGma was developed in compliance with FDA’s quality-by-design (QbD) initiative. With optionally integrated advanced process control and process analytical technology (PAT) tools that enable monitoring during production, quality can be designed into products from the start. According to GEA, the platform has been tested on more than 100 different formulations and is already being used by several large pharmaceutical companies and manufacturing sites worldwide.