CEMS Seminar - Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou
Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou, Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware
Seminar title: "Can we make drugs faster, cheaper, and better? Yes, we can: Process Systems Engineering Approaches to Advance Pharmaceutical Manufacturing"
Abstract:
The global pharmaceutical industry has been on an growing trend since the early 2000s, enhancing life expectancies and healthcare around the world. As a result, the overall pharmaceutical revenue and sales have steadily been increasing, reaching $1.27 trillion dollars in 2020, 25% of which is allocated to research and development. Regulated by government agencies like U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicine Agency, drug industry has been traditionally resisted to changes especially related to drug production/manufacturing a trend that has been revised over the last decade to enable more efficient and agile manufacturing technologies and to ensure product quality eliminating drug shortages.
Recent developments towards Industry 4.0 have led to generation of large volume of data for the entire manufacturing cycle that could lead to complete transformation of drug manufacturing. However, what is needed is the development of efficient approaches that are capable to efficiently extract the available information, visualize the state of the system, and help in the decision making.
Process Systems Engineering tools can play a critical role in this transformation with the development of new modeling frameworks and algorithmic solution approaches. The major challenges to achieve this goal, and highlights of the work that has been performed in our lab in the last 10 years to address these problems will be highlighted in the talk.
Marianthi Ierapetritou is the Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Delaware. Prior to that she has been a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. During the last year at Rutgers University she led the efforts of the university advancing the careers in STEM for women at Rutgers as an Associate Vice President of the University.
Dr. Ierapetritou’s research focuses on the following areas: 1) process operations; (2) design and synthesis of flexible production systems with emphasis on pharmaceutical manufacturing; 3) energy and sustainability process modeling and operations; and 4) modeling of biopharmaceutical production. Her research is supported by several federal (FDA, NIH, NSF, ONR, NASA, DOE) and industrial (BMS, J&J, GSK, PSE, Bosch, Eli Lilly) grants.
Among her accomplishments are the appointment as the Gore Centennial Professor in 2019, the promotion to distinguished professor at Rutgers University in 2017, the 2016 Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division Award in Computing in Chemical Engineering which is the highest distinction in the Systems area of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the Award of Division of Particulate Preparations and Design (PPD) of The Society of Powder Technology, Japan; the Outstanding Faculty Award at Rutgers; the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Award for Scholarly Excellence; and the prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has served as a Consultant to the FDA under the Advisory Committee for Pharmaceutical Science and Clinical Pharmacology, elected as a fellow of AICHE and as a Director in the board of AIChE. She has more than 270 publications and has been an invited speaker to numerous national and international conferences.
Dr. Ierapetritou obtained her BS from The National Technical University in Athens, Greece, her PhD from Imperial College (London, UK) in 1995 and subsequently completed her post-doctoral research at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ).
