Role of automation-Pharmaceutical industry

Submitted by

J.S.R Moorthy Prasun bheri Y.N.V.K.M Subbarao

murthy_mitr12@yahoo.com Prasun.bheri@gmail.com subbu_yedida@yahoo.com

Progressive Engineering College

 Role of automation-Pharmaceutical industry

Abstract - In the health care segment, pharmaceutical industry plays an important role by
providing appropriate drugs to combat the diseases. In order to cope up with the ever
increasing demands of the health care segment, pharmaceutical industry is constantly
looking for optimal solutions. Automation helps in achieving these goals.

Introduction – The quest to improve the drug discovery process, to find new drugs
demands stringent quality standards which are difficult to achieve in manual processes.
These results in poor performance of the research labs, which is measured by the number
of products found by a lab for the investment in infrastructure and associated recurring
revenue expenditure. Automation is the solution to overcome these drawbacks.

Automation helps in systematizing the processes, improving the quality along with
reducing the time frames. This results in consistent, accurate, valid and repeated results in
the following fields:

• Drug discovery process.

• Drug manufacturing process.
• Inspection and quality control.

Drug discovery process -

Robots are employed in all aspects of drug development activities viz., synthesizing large
verities of potentially viable chemical combinations conceived by researchers, producing
and documenting these in the lab and conducting the field trials to check the performance
of the candidate combinations.

The actual process of drug discovery begins with scientific research to discover new
products and to improve or modify existing ones. The R&D departments in
pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing firms start this process by seeking new
chemical compounds by selecting few of the possible candidates from a collection of
potential combinations which usually run in to few hundreds of thousands. Automation
helps in choosing a right combination by associating a mathematical model comprising of
weight age factors. This has resulted in new disciplines like combinatorial chemistry,
computer modeling and simulation in the Parma research domain.
Atomization - drug discovery

Drug discovery involves iterative testing of the specimen with different samples .This
laborious process can be automated by using the following schema:

Take the specimen along with reactants

in a sterilized specimen tray.

Place the specimen in reactants

jar.

Tabulate the initial reaction Mobilize the specimen for further analysis
status if necessary or halt the process

Create the record of positively

Catalyze the compound identified elements

Take the parametrical readings Identify the cell with

of the reaction positive reaction

End of process

fig-1: Typical schema representing the process flow.

 A typical implementation of the above schema is presented below:

Fig-2 Xantus state of the art flexible automated XYZ pipetting and robotic workstation

Atomization – drug manufacturing

In spite of the economic hardships faced because of slow growth rate, drug
manufacturing industry is aggressively heading towards automation of the plants to reap
the benefits like quality products, minimal wastage, consistent production schedules and
associated cost benefits. This has resulted in promotion of many robot vendors, system
integrators and process automation consultants to provide end to end solutions for
manufacturing, material handling and quality control applications.
Fig-3 A leading pharmaceutical company’s fully automated system that would increase productivity,
meet extremely tight repeatability specification and achieve high dot placement density.

Atomization – drug testing

This phase is highly important and must be give special attention .The main objective of
this stage is to prevent spurious drugs to enter the market. Absence of this phase may lead
to disaster to human life. This process is a long one and high technology is used perform
this task. Atomization provides a safer and accurate way of inspecting.

Drug inspection involves tests for contaminants which range from biological agents to
microscopic dust particles. Tracing these impurities is a challenging process. All these
processes can be accomplished in one stage by a systematic atomized process.

Automated drug testing machines or DNA decoders use robot arms to fill thousands of
miniscule wells on a single plate. Each well may represent six months of work on a single
drug compound.
Fig-4 Demonstration of a robotic arm performing a visual inspection on the on the chemical samples
on a conveyer belt

Case study - EPSON Robotics has implemented automation in a Shunt manufacturing

industry. The application called for sorting the needles into three categories based on
their lengths. A combination of visual inspection and a sorting robot have been
successfully integrated to determine the size and orientation of the needle and feed the
needles into the injection molding machine. This has resulted in seamless integration and
automation of plastic shunt manufacturing unit.

Statutory Requirements - In each and every country the government controls and
regulates Parma industry to protect the life of the citizens. Stringent laws are enacted and
implemented to steam line manufacturing and quality norms. This helps in prevention of
spurious drugs entering the market. All the above objectives are easily achieved by
implementing automation solutions. This also reduces cost of manufacturing and
improves the profitability of company. Parma industry is looking for most of these
products which are subject to strict Food and Drug Administration rules regarding
validation, documentation and manufacturing practices, such as 21 CFR parts 11. At the
same time, manufacturing processes are typically subject to Class 100 cleanroom
specifications set out in ISO 14644-1. Because of these strict regulations and the time
along with the costs of validating each product, they typically have longer lifetimes.
Advantages –
• Preventing the spurious drugs entering the market
• Records are managed properly
• The results obtained are reliable and veracious

Conclusion - A few years ago many of the robots used in lab automation applications
were very light duty. Today, duty cycles are going up rapidly, even though in many
cases, the speeds are relatively minimal. When duty cycles are high, a poor up-time can
rapidly take the yield out of the system, so the industry is becoming more and more
interested in reliability. In order to meet the current day requirements more sophisticated
technology should be adopted.

Though lot of advancements have taken place small and medium scale industries
have not adapted this technology because of cost effective tailor made solutions for this
specific processes we intend to work in this field by offering affordable solutions.

We thank Dr.K.Ravindra principal Progressive Engineering college,

Dr Rama krishna H.O.D (c.s.e), Devaraj Naidu H.O.D (e.e.e). Our special thanks to
Prof.G.Krishna Murthy for motivating and guiding us in preparation of this paper.