Anton Middelberg, PhD, deputy vice-chancellor and vice-president of research at the University of Adelaide in Australia, believes industry reluctance to go continuous reflects the traditional focus on batch-mode production and, in some areas, the technical challenges.
“The complexity in continuous manufacturing is not trivial, and the industry has a well-established paradigm of batch processing which has worked well up to now and has been for a long time locked in by regulatory factors,” he says. The paradigm has been, Pharma is done in batches.