Tom Verbeek obtained his master in drug development in 2019 at the Catholic University of Leuven. For his master’s thesis, he performed a validation study on lab equipment at MSD in Heist-op-den-Berg. In 2020, he finished his studies Industrial Pharmacy at the Ghent University. Subsequently, he started his PhD at the laboratory of pharmaceutical technology to address crucial gaps of knowledge for industrial implementation of continuous tablet manufacturing via direct compression.
Summary of Research Project(s)
During drug product development, limited amounts of new chemical entities are available to investigate the effect of formulation and process variables on the final drug product. The first aim is therefore to develop a strategy for identification of a surrogate component, i.e. a component with similar characteristics as the new chemical entity, to use during early process and formulation development trials. Furthermore, continuous feeding of very cohesive raw materials is often challenging and affects further downstream processing. Therefore, various formulation strategies to overcome feeding issues of very cohesive raw materials in function of process parameters will be developed. Finally, a control strategy based on residence time distributions is of utmost importance to ensure the final product quality and traceability along the manufacturing line. Therefore, the critical formulation and process parameters affecting residence time distributions on a continuous direct compression line will be investigated and predictive models will be built for each unit operation and for the integrated line
