A large collaborative team led by Alina Alexeenko, Professor of Chemical Engineering, is working to quanti­fy the heat and mass transfer during lyophilization — the freeze drying of pharmaceutical products. 

Currently, more than 40% of all newly-formed injectable drugs and vaccines are freeze-dried for long-term storage, but this unit operation is far from opti­mized — it’s one of the longest, costliest and highly-variable operations in the downstream processing of biologics. It can take up to a week to freeze-dry a batch of vials for long-term drug storage, because heat transfer is highly inefficient at the near vacuum condi­tions needed for freeze-drying to occur. 

To get around this bottleneck, the Purdue research group recently re­ceived a large grant (~$900,000) from the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals to develop new methods to drastically ac­celerate freeze drying using microwave and radiofrequency heating.

The Davidson Startup Fund helped to accelerate this research by hiring students, purchasing equipment and initiating collaborations with industrial partners. Currently, this new technolo­gy has demonstrated ~2x speedup in drying with no discernible effects on protein stability.

NEXT GIANT LEAP 

The team is collaborating with sci­entists at Merck and manufacturing companies such as Ima Life to make this technology a reality, which will allow drugs to be stored long-term at lower costs.

Vivek Narsimhan, Ott Assistant Professor of Chemical Engi­neering, recently joined the lyophilization research team. Narsimhan’s specific contri­bution to this project is to develop heat and mass transfer models to improve efficiency of this process and to be implemented in process control.

The Davidson Startup Fund allowed the team to take fundamental research and translate it to practical technologies that will play a major role in improving drug storage for the pharmaceutical industry.

"We are eternally grateful for [the Davidson's] support of this research. It positions us to take our next giant leap and make meaningful contributions to society,” Vivek Narsimhan,