Abstract

Drugs for Africa: Process Intensification for API Synthesis Exploiting Continuous Manufacturing

Paul Watts, Distinguished Professor and Research Chair, Nelson Mandela University

While Africa has a variety of companies that formulate medicines, it does not have any form of pharmaceutical industry that manufactures the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) with the consequence that these need to be imported. This results in increased drug costs making medications unaffordable to most patients in Africa. The current pandemic has further demonstrated supply chain issues when relying entirely on imported products.

To this effect, we are working on developing local drug manufacturing capacity in Africa using continuous flow technology, with the goal of lowering the cost of drugs, improving drug accessibility and ultimately improving Africa’s health. We are developing cost effective and efficient continuous flow synthetic processes towards a variety of drugs to demonstrate that they can be manufactured at lower cost in Africa. The presentation will give a few case studies.