The project aimed to address a key challenge for the pharmaceutical industry; getting new innovative medicines to patients in the quickest and most cost-effective way possible.¹

The consortium hoped to achieve this goal by exploring how current and new ‘Digital Design’ techniques can be used, such as predictive modeling, which can then be applied and used within research, development and manufacturing workflows to eliminate non-viable medicine candidate formulations as early as possible, thereby enhancing decision making and accelerating development.¹

It set an ambition to be able to create ‘virtual medicine manufacturing systems’ to test effectiveness and efficiencies before creating them in the real world.²

The project was part-funded under the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chains Initiative (AMSCI) and supported by the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP). Each of the 4 pharmaceutical companies involved (AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GSK and Pfizer) are providing industrial case studies to help with continuous improvement of the digital design tools and methodologies.³

In March 2019, the ADDoPT project team hosted a major international showcase event. This event demonstrated the range of industry-ready new models, tools and approaches for digital design and operation of drug manufacturing processes and product performance arising from this major UK collaborative project.⁴

Bringing together a wide range of predictive models and insight from industrial case studies, the ADDoPT Digital Design Showcase has demonstrated real-world  business benefits including:⁴

The project has proven that close collaboration between government, industry and academia really can work, and we hope that the ‘Digital Design’ techniques can be refined and implemented further, so that patients gain access to much needed medicines faster in the future.