Rutgers Global is partnering with the Rutgers Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (C-SOPS) on a pharmaceutical engineering conference geared toward higher education institutions and regulatory agencies throughout Latin America. Titled Ingeniería farmacéutica 2021, the conference is a series of eight webinar presentations featuring six Rutgers faculty from C-SOPS, who will cover different aspects pertaining to materials science and its application to continuous manufacturing processes. The conference series runs from May 12 through June 30. (Visit this webpage for more information.)
Advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing has become a strategic priority for regulatory agencies in the United States, Japan, and some European countries due to its many advantages over traditional methods (e.g., batch). Benefits like real-time quality control, for example, allow for increased drug safety. Last year, with COVID taking hold of the world and severely disrupting supply chains, many countries and companies started to reconsider the benefits of domestic manufacturing rather than off-shore production.
Ingeniería farmacéutica 2021 is the second pharmaceutical engineering conference organized by the Rutgers Global Latin America Initiative (LAI) and C-SOPS, and like the previous conference, it will be free of cost and in Spanish. The last session on June 30 will be a roundtable discussion on technology transfer with C-SOPS Director and distinguished professor Fernando Muzzio and panelists from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, and will be simultaneously translated into English.
The Rutgers Global Latin American Initiatives, led by Marcelo Meregalli Ferrer, has partnered with C-SOPS to share knowledge and expertise. As Meregalli Ferrer notes, “The goal is to turn C-SOPS into a technology gateway for universities, industry, and regulatory agencies all over the world.”
Founded in 2006, C-SOPS is an engineering research center focused on the design of new technologies for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Under the leadership of Dr. Muzzio, the center collaborates locally and internationally with companies and regulatory agencies (including the FDA) to develop and implement continuous manufacturing.
Ingeniería farmacéutica 2021 is being done in collaboration with Argentina’s Academy of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, and it has received the support of the Mexican Consulate in New York and the Organization of American States (OAS), which will provide simultaneous translation into English during the last session.
Meregalli Ferrer shared that “more than 2,300 people from over 22 countries have registered for the conference and we expect the number to grow for the last, less technical session. We are already beginning to see the ways in which we are having an impact.”
The first pharmaceutical engineering conference was held in November of 2020, and was an introductory conference delivered by Dr. Muzzio. More than 800 people from companies, universities, regulatory agencies and other public entities in 22 countries participated in the conference.
Meregalli Ferrar said, “Rutgers Global and C-SOPS have been very intentional in their approach, from leveraging the speakers’ ability to present in Spanish, to making it a free activity, to building strong in-country connections. We want to advance this technology by sharing Rutgers’ knowledge and expertise, and to open spaces for collaboration. The work C-SOPS does is cutting-edge and extremely relevant.”
He added, “While all this has translated into massive registration to the webinar series, the endgame for this partnership is to advance knowledge and to open spaces for collaboration and to grow a robust and impactful engagement in the region.”
The Ingeniería farmacéutica conferences are available in playlists on the Rutgers Global YouTube channel.