Press Room

Press Clipping / Mar 22, 2018

Five Minutes with Marco Gil - DCAT WEEK’18

TKS, TeckoScienze Publisher, March 22, 2018

Marco Gil picture Hovione Senior VP Sales and Marketing

Marco Gil

Senior VP - Sales & Marketing
Marco Gil has a degree in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Technical University of Lisbon.
 
In 2007 he joined Hovione as an Associate Engineer in the R&D Particle Design area. In May 2011 he was appointed as a Director of R&D Process Chemistry. He has held several management responsibilities, including Site General Manager of the Hovione site in New Jersey, US. From 2017 to 2022, Marco held leadership positions in Sales.
 
Since May 2022 he is the Senior Vice-President of Sales & Marketing at Hovione.

 

 

 

 

PH: How is business right now?

Gil: Business is going well. The CDMO industry is quite busy, not just Hovione. It comes naturally from the good environment that investors found in the biotech sector overall, so there are many programmes ongoing in development. Business is well funded, there is a lot of activity and CDMOs benefit from that. Also, large pharma continues to divest manufacturing assets. The trends of recent years remain and I think they will continue for the next months. The off-patents business is growing too. There is a lot of interest in niche, specialised APIs with specific properties from a physical standpoint.

PH: What specialised technologies are you investing in?

Gil: Spray drying is one of our core technologies,...

 

Read the full interview

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Continuous Tableting (CT) is defined as continuous manufacturing of oral dose drugs, specifically tablets. As per ICH's Q13 definition1, a continuous manufacturing process in the pharmaceutical industry comprises at least two unit operations integrated from a mechanical and software perspective. There is a wide combination of possible CT process configurations that are dependent on the needs of the intended product formulation and each of the individual unit operations that constitute the process train can be continuous, semi-continuous, or batch processes. The typical manufacturing processes for tablet formulation are direct compression (DC), dry granulation (DG) and wet granulation (WG)2 - details on these manufacturing processes are beyond the scope of this article, so the interested reader is directed to relevant literature. The actual implementation of CT technology in a facility can broadly vary depending on the level of desired integration and automation. Process trains can be designed to be flexible and converted between multiple configurations (e.g. continuous DC, DG and WG), controlled by the end user from one single software and within a single clean room. The other possibility would be for subsections of the CT process to be divided into multiple clean rooms where inprocess materials are transferred between suites via a bin-to-bin approach (e.g. a granulation suite to prepare granules from raw materials followed by continuous DC (CDC) to blend the granules and produce tablets). The level of automation and instrumentation designed into the CT process (typically involving Process Analytical Technologies, PAT) can open the possibility to implement sophisticated control strategies. Key components of a control strategy that need to be considered for CT are material tracking and genealogy, knowledge of the residence time distribution (RTD), and in-process controls (spectroscopic and/or soft sensors based on process parameters). Holistically, these control strategy elements enable the implementation of a material diversion strategy to automatically divert out of specification material from the process. In their most advanced form, control strategies may also enable real time release testing (RTRt) of the final tablet drug product and reduce the off-line analytical burden and the number of operators needed to manage the process.   Read the full article at gmp-journal.com  

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