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The Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (C-SOPS), based at the Rutgers School of Engineering in Piscataway, and Thermo Fisher Scientific have collaborated to accelerate the university's ongoing research on continuous manufacturing techniques for pharmaceutical discovery.

C-SOPS has obtained the Pharma 11 twin screw extruder/granulator, which will be used for testing of hot melt extrusion (HME) and wet granulation processes in continuous manufacturing with the support from Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Fernando J. Muzzio, director, National Science Foundation/Engineering Research Center on Structured Organic Particulate Systems and a Rutgers professor said that they are very pleased to deepen this important relationship with Thermo Fisher Scientific and thus tey are looking forward with other industrial partners on the particular applications.

Researchers at C-SOPS will focus on developing polymer selection criteria for HME tamper resistant and sustained release formulation science. They also will explore twin screw granulation formulation science with an emphasis on understanding binder time scales because those from batch applications are often not relevant.

The Rutgers Engineering Research Center, established nine years ago with funding from the National Science Foundation and a consortium of more than 40 companies within the pharmaceutical sector, is the world's largest academic-based research organization dedicated to modernizing pharmaceutical manufacturing of solid oral dose medications.

The pharmaceutical industry has been slow to adopt this technology, which is the standard in many other industries

C-SOPS engineers designed and built one of the first full production-scale continuous direct compression solid oral dosage manufacturing facilities, which is being used as a model by pharmaceutical manufacturers. C-SOPS has been researching a wide variety of areas, including powder processing and materials properties, process modeling and control, and in-line process analytical technology in order to design and implement robust and reliable manufacturing processes that meet the quality standards of a regulated industry at lower cost.