EPSRC MediForge Hub: Industry 5.0 Medicines Manufacturing Research Hub

Ensuring access to affordable, safe, and sustainable medicines is imperative. However, the pharmaceutical industry faces significant contemporary challenges to respond to the needs of patients and produce new medicines faster while managing rising healthcare costs, fragile global supply chains and the impacts of climate crisis. Current methods to develop new processes, driven by a commitment to patient safety and quality, exhibit a natural compromise with their inherent inflexibility, inefficiency and protracted pace. The pandemic laid bare the need for agile, flexible, resilient and secure medicine supply chains and climate change and geopolitical uncertainties create further pressures on assuring patient access to affordable, sustainable medicines. Considering the pharmaceutical sector's significant carbon emissions, high resource intensity and waste generation from its operations, prioritising sustainability is of paramount importance to MediForge's industry partners. Accelerating medicine development approaches to match the rapid progress in drug discovery is essential, all the while upholding safety, ensuring the highest medicine quality.

The MediForge Hub, co-created with industry, aims to transform the development and manufacturing of medicines through pioneering an Industry 5.0 manufacturing system for sustainable, resilient and human-centric medicine production. MediForge will address a grand challenge on transforming sustainable Chemistry, Manufacture and Control (CMC) approaches via human-centric cyber-physical infrastructure for Industry 5.0. CMC methodologies play a vital role in the pharmaceutical industry as they ensure medicines are safe and consistent by examining their chemical composition and assuring manufacturing processes and quality control measures guarantee patient safety.

The MediForge Hub will revolutionise CMC approaches through forging medicine development and advanced manufacturing seamlessly with digital technologies and enable the future workforce to realise the goals of Industry 5.0. The Hub aims to: transform our system-wide understanding of molecules to the final product through the development of:

- a novel integrated cyber-physical research infrastructure

- a world-first medicine development and manufacturing data fabric

- a reconfigurable end-to-end manufacturing testbed

This will be delivered through five research platforms, focusing on creating a system of cyber-physical platforms that integrate scale-down processes with various technologies like AI, robotics, and smart sensors (Platform 1). We will create and connect a data fabric that links material properties, process settings and final product attributes, and advanced system-wide models to inform a real-time digital twin of the entire manufacturing process (Platform 2). The real-time digital twin will drive a new flexible and resilient system for manufacturing pharmaceuticals using modular and reconfigurable technology to increase efficiency and adaptability.