The following blog post was provided by Peyton Myers, an undergraduate student at Appalachian State University. Myers attended the 2023 ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo in Las Vegas as an ISPE Foundation Professional Development Grant recipient.
A record-setting 640 attendees gathered in Rome in March for the 2018 ISPE Europe Annual Conference. More than 70 sessions offered the latest thinking on topics including facilities of the future, digitization, mass serialization, and the need for data integrity, but the spotlight was on how Industry 4.0 will inform the development of Pharma 4.0™ and its implications for pharmaceuticals and the life sciences. Annex 1 was another hot topic, as a plenary session with regulators from EMA, FDA, and Russia discussed industry comments on the first draft, which was published in December 2017.
We’ve gathered a few highlights here to provide a quick overview of the 2018 ISPE Europe Annual Conference sessions. More details will be published in the July-August issue of Pharmaceutical Engineering magazine.
Implementing new industry 4.0-based manufacturing concepts in Pharma 4.0™ requires alignment of expectations, interpretation, and definitions, explained Dr. Thomas Uslaender, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security, Munich. System interoperability, such as mass packaging serialization to keep falsified medicines out of the legitimate supply chain, is a key factor for technical success.
While most first- and second-world nations already have serialization protocols in place, emerging nations are now beginning to regulate as well. Andreas Walter, General Manager of European Medicines Verification Organisation, Brussels, predicted that Industry 4.0 in the pharmaceutical realm will help bring these guidances into harmony.
Andre Overmeyer, Merck Darmstadt, shared success factors for implementation:
Quality risk management is a key topic. Others included:
Something for Everyone
ISPE’s Young Professionals Hackathon included a keynote speaker and an interactive Pharma 4.0™ session. The fourteenth Annual Facility of the Year Awards category winners were announced. Other sessions featured sterile manufacturing, aseptic processing, and models for how common industry 4.0 concepts could be adapted for Pharma 4.0™ in the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry.
The 2019 ISPE Europe Annual Conference will be in Dublin, 1–3 April 2019. Did you attend the conference? Please send your feedback to Thomas Zimmer, ISPE Europe Vice President.
The following blog post was provided by Peyton Myers, an undergraduate student at Appalachian State University. Myers attended the 2023 ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo in Las Vegas as an ISPE Foundation Professional Development Grant recipient.
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