FCTH

Government of Telangana State has announced the setting up of a multi-industry supported innovation and technology hub for Flow Chemistry in Hyderabad as an initiative aimed towards ensuring greater incorporation of flow chemistry techniques during pharma R&D and greater adoption of continuous synthesis for manufacturing of active pharma ingredients (APIs).

This hub would function as a Center of Excellence (CoE) and is being set-up at Dr. Reddy’s Institute of Life Sciences (DRILS), a research institute of global eminence, and will receive funding and patronage from Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd and Laurus Labs. Research activities at the CoE will benefit from the scientific mentorship and support from world-renowned scientists like Prof. Goverdhan Mehta (University of Hyderabad) and international advisors such as Prof. Steven Ley (University of Cambridge, UK), Prof. Oliver Kappe (University of Graz, Austria), Prof. Shu Kobayashi (University of Tokyo, Japan) with deep expertise in the area of flow chemistry and continuous manufacturing. The Government of Telangana will facilitate strategic support and scale up for the hub by encouraging more industries join the consortium and benefit from it.

Indian pharma sector is dominated by the generic industry with API and API intermediates being the key constituents. In an ever-challenging pharma market, increasing structural complexity, complex chemical transformations and multi-step synthesis are increasingly becoming a commonplace requirement even in case of the key synthetic intermediates. Despite being aware of the benefits of adopting flow technologies in this scenario and the will being there, the Indian API industry is finding it difficult to adopt flow technologies and adapt to the changing paradigm of continuous manufacturing. The hub would enable a streamlined translation of a chemical process, demonstrated successfully in flow on lab scale, into one that is well-poised for continuous manufacturing requires an informed choice of appropriate flow chemistry tools and utilities.