Automation in the pharmaceutical industry is implementing error-free drug-making

Manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry is way different from other sectors. The production of medicines involves critical factors like safety, efficacy, and pharmacokinetics of candidate drug molecules. Pharmaceutical industry has evolved into a digital forum today. Earlier, most of the manufacturing processes were manual and often took several people even to make a single tablet or a bottle of syrup. Technology has brought in an amazing source called automation, which is revolutionising drug development.

The pharmaceutical industry is more complex than we think. A single hesitant move could ruin the whole medicine formula. Moreover, accuracy plays a pivotal role in drug manufacturing. The pharmaceutical industry can’t afford to make errors in design or manufacturing easily. Besides, developing new medicine and gaining approval from governments takes over ten years and costs around US$2 billion. Driven by the continuous hassle due to time consumption and money, drug developers are turning their heads towards automation. By implying disruptive technologies into a pharmaceutical manufacturer, the mechanism analyses large swathes of data and experiments it across a huge population. This action loosens the long struggle of finding efficacy as the dataset is large. With the help of automation, drugmakers can achieve flexibility, optimise production, and follow regulatory compliance. It replaces the quality measures that were done manually so far. Automation is now implemented to eliminate errors.

Remarkably, various types of automation are being used in the pharmaceutical industry. Laboratory automation supplies ready-to-install handling and positioning systems for automated analysis processes. Pharmaceutical production automation assembles modular and scalable plants. Automating filling and packaging mechanism enhances the level of hygiene in the factory. Bringing automation into the pharmaceutical industry has its own set of advantages. Henceforth, Industry Wired brings you a list of benefits that the pharmaceutical industry leverages by implementing automation.

Making personalized medicine

One of the major setbacks the pharmaceutical industry faces is that it provides identical medicine to many patients. The only differences the drug makers consider while manufacturing medicines are gender, age, genetics and disease. This might address the broad population, but for people suffering from a new variant of the disease, the common medicines are hopeless. The recent development in drug manufacturing is pointing towards personalised medicine which could only be availed with the help of automation. Automated systems are fed with large datasets that analyses information like patient medical history, genotype data, familial inheritance and biomedical research. These details help make personalised medicine for the patient.

Substituting human intervention

It is natural for humans to make errors. But pharmaceutical industry can’t afford to take human errors as it is bound to be accurate. Human involvement in drug manufacturing makes the process lengthy by checking it ones again for mistakes. However, with the help of automation, drugmakers can help reduce the number of manual steps involved in the production, such as incubation transfers, colony counts, data entry, and other repetitive tasks that consume time and might cause errors.

Increasing productivity and profitability

The pharmaceutical industry is facing significant challenges like intense competition, higher production requirements, and a strict regulatory environment. Henceforth, the drug makers are bound to embrace automation to harness the power of integrated control and information system to build a connected enterprise. Automation provides real-time access and extended enterprise visibility to vital manufacturing data. This helps implement business process improvements and increase access to real-time production details.