Visitors to ACHEMA this year were shown a preview of the latest V5.0 version of Optimal Industrial Automation’s Process Analytical Technology (PAT) knowledge management software, synTQ. The company reports significant interest in the ‘game changing’ software across the board as news of the global majors adopting it increases market awareness, including a high level of interest from Asian buyers.

Martin Gadsby, Director of Optimal Industrial Automation Ltd, comments ‘ACHEMA with a focus on PAT has been a key show for us this year as it drew in the international pharmaceutical, biotech and life science audience that is adopting the principles of PAT in order to reduce the time to market for new drugs and increase productivity of existing lines.
‘Previewing the latest version of our synTQ software suite was the right thing to do as the interest in this product alone (we also build automation systems for pharmaceutical and general process applications) has resulted in our technical sales team flying around the globe to see several completely new customers.’

Several of the major international pharmaceutical manufacturers are now standardising on synTQ software in order to take advantage of the benefits that working within a PAT framework can bring, hence we had plenty of people we needed to meet with at the show, mainly to finalise arrangements for roll-out to new sites based on positive experience with testing and pilot projects.

We are seeing some projects reducing the time taken to produce valuable drugs from weeks to literally minutes which is having a correspondingly huge positive impact on production quality, cost base and profitability.

Process Analytical Technology when correctly applied can transform pharmaceutical production by reducing development and manufacturing times while simultaneously improving quality and reducing cost. This applies to both batch and discrete manufacturing methods. PAT also facilitates continuous manufacturing and real time release, each of these techniques on their own will amplify the already significant gains that PAT can deliver, but together the improvements can be simply staggering.

There is no doubt that the description of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) delivering a paradigm shift for the industry is justified; it is a key emergent process technology that is now allowing the pharmaceutical industry to make a step change from the stricture of slow, inefficient and cumbersome production techniques to more advanced batch production or fully integrated regulatory compliant continuous production techniques.

As demonstrated by our experiences exhibiting at the ACHEMA show synTQ V5.0 is playing a key part in the latest chapter of this industrial step change.