Pharma has always had
an innovative mindset.
GEA's drive to invest in novel
technologies has resulted in us being
market leaders
and market drivers for change.
Traditionally, pharmaceutical products
have been made in a batch method.
This is a bit like baking a cake where you
put all of the ingredients into one bowl,
you mix it up, and then you move
that on to the next processing step.
This has been a process that has been
around for a very long period of time,
is easy to validate and easy to replicate.
This applies to wet granulation,
dry granulation, and direct compression
and remains the de facto process solution
for legacy pharmaceutical products.
Continuous manufacturing is
a relatively new manufacturing method
in the pharmaceutical industry
for solid dosage products.
It enables new products to be made faster,
using less material and in a shorter space
of time, which for new emerging
treatments is really important.
Continuous manufacturing has
a smaller footprint, enabling
factories to be smaller and leaner.
And they also tend to use less energy as
well, which feeds into the sustainability
discussion that we're having.
The CDC is part of our Consigma product
portfolio, which is our range
of continuous manufacturing solutions.
CDC stands for Continuous Direct Compression,
or Consigma Direct Compression
as we like to say, and is the process
of continuously feeding in
individual raw ingredients,
mixing them together, and producing
tablets without any stops in between.
This allows the process to be leaner,
quicker to making the end product,
and require less energy input.
Combining processes into a continuous
manufacturing solution
massively reduces the footprint
of the overall machine,
which helps in terms of the size
of the room you need,
which is very energy demanding in how it's
run for temperature stability
and airflow control.
We've also looked at reducing
the electrical energy requirement
of the CDC and our CDC 200,
which has its own Add Better label,
is proven to be 30% more energy
efficient than its predecessor.
In pharmaceutical manufacturing,
it's not just looking at every individual
component, but looking at the entire
solution for its energy efficiency.
We seek out completely implemented
solutions that are better in terms of
their energy usage and therefore
are more sustainable
and at the end of the day, cheaper
to run from a business point of view.
