Abstract

Continuous Flow Manufacturing: Africa’s Possibility of Developing API 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 from overseas. This results in increased drug costs making medications unaffordable to most patients in Africa as they fall in the low-middle income bracket. 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.