New technologies for medicine manufacture: developing innovative processes from first principles
Professor Afzal Mohammed
An industry placement during his undergraduate studies first sparked Afzal Mohammed’s fascination with the way medicines are made.
His career is dedicated to developing innovative platform technologies to transform pharmaceutical manufacturing processes and revolutionise our experience of taking medicines.
"I feel honoured and fortunate to work at Aston University, which has a unique record of research impact and commercialisation. Translation of research is in the University’s DNA and a central part of its research culture."
Making medicines for all ages
Afzal’s research was originally motivated by a central challenge: developing medicines for children. Most medicines are formulated primarily for adults – but children’s needs are very different. Younger patients are very diverse, from newborns to teenagers, each with different physiologies and metabolism.
To make medicines more suitable for children, Afzal’s work focused on tablets that disintegrate in the mouth. A key regulatory requirement for paediatric medicines is to have minimal ‘excipients’, the non-active ingredients which bind the drugs together and ensure a tablet has the correct properties. His research also studied how to combine multiple drugs in one tablet, useful for major global diseases like TB, where ensuring consistent compliance is key to successful treatment.
Afzal soon found that established ways of developing medicines, particularly blending excipients and keeping their quantity low, weren’t suitable for creating tablets with the complex properties they needed. Undeterred, he went back to the drawing board, looking at the optimum conditions needed to create paediatric formulations with low amounts of excipients. This led Afzal to develop an entirely new technique called isothermal dry particle coating (iDPC). This world-first process creates fine powders that can mask bitter tasting drugs and allows for precision formulation of medicines using limited excipients.
"From the start of my academic career, I’ve always been interested in innovative technologies which can have the broadest possible application and the widest possible impact. Finding new ways to process and manufacture medicines is very different to finding a cure for a specific illness – but can eventually help the treatment of thousands of patients across many different diseases."
Innovation through industry partnerships
Afzal’s novel iDPC technology was not the first time he’d created something completely new by rethinking established scientific techniques. During his PhD at Aston University, supported by the global pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, he’d taken inspiration from cell membrane structures to suggest an innovative method for protecting lipid-based nanoparticles during freeze drying of medicines. By using amino acids, Afzal was able to make these nanoparticles more stable, a key step in the manufacture of many drugs.
He then applied these findings to formulate orally disintegrating tablets with amino acids as stabilisers. This led to his first patent, and four more have since followed to protect his groundbreaking research discoveries in paediatric medicines and novel formulation processes. All of Afzal’s research is either partly or fully funded through industry with a strong focus on solving real-industry challenges in ways that deliver immediate commercial impact.
Afzal’s groundbreaking discovery of the new iDPC formulation technique led to a spin out company, Aston Particle Technologies (APT). Created in 2016, APT has raised over £2 million in grants and investments, and works with many large pharmaceutical companies to apply iDPC to optimise their drug development processes. The technique is particularly applicable for formulating inhaled powders and sensitive medicines such as vaccines.
"What began as an idea, then proof-of-concept in the laboratory, has now been scaled up through the spin out company to an industrial scale process, to make it commercially viable. Seeing your research taken forward into pharmaceutical manufacture is incredibly rewarding."
Transforming our experience of taking tablets
Afzal is continually creating new technologies which are set to transform how medicines are developed and our experiences of taking them.
He has developed a cell model that mimics the buccal tissue within the mouth, helping researchers to better formulate and test new medicines that disintegrate on the tongue . He is working on a further model using taste bud cells to screen drugs for bitter taste before they are tested on people.
Afzal’s research is also supporting the pharmaceutical sector in the UK, through three Knowledge Transfer Partnerships with UK pharmaceutical companies. Through these projects, Afzal’s expertise in manufacturing processes is helping the companies develop new medicines, improve their manufacturing efficiency and get new medicines to patients more quickly, including drugs that are more difficult to manufacture.
Impact snapshot
"The culture at Aston meant that from the start, you think about what the next steps might be if your research is successful: where could it go and who could it benefit? The University has always invested in resources and expertise to help academics commercialise their research, because they know what benefits impactful research can deliver to society."
"Tapping into Aston University’s research expertise in this area was fundamental to getting this project off the ground, and means that our unique products are now ready to take forward into clinical trials."
Majad Hussain, Director, Quest Pharm Ltd
