General procedure to aid the development of continuous pharmaceutical processes using multivariate statistical modeling – An industrial case study

Streamlining the manufacturing process has been recognized as a key issue to reduce production costs and improve safety in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Although data available from earlier developmental stages are often sparse and unstructured, they can be very useful to improve the understanding about the process under development. In this paper, a general procedure is proposed for the application of latent variable statistical methods to support the development of new continuous processes in the presence of limited experimental data. The proposed procedure is tested on an industrial case study concerning the development of a continuous line for the manufacturing of paracetamol tablets. The main driving forces acting on the process are identified and ranked according to their importance in explaining the variability in the available data. This improves the understanding about the process by elucidating how different active pharmaceutical ingredient pretreatments, different formulation modes and different settings on the processing units affect the overall operation as well as the properties of the intermediate and final products. The results can be used as a starting point to perform a comprehensive and science-based quality risk assessment that help to define a robust control strategy, possibly enhanced with the integration of a design space for the continuous process at a later stage.