CONTINUUS Pharmaceuticals

CONTINUUS’ mission is to produce high-quality drugs that can be delivered to patients more effectively and at a lower cost. In achieving this goal, we look to radically transform the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, steering it away from outdated batch systems to state-of-the-art continuous processes. CONTINUUS is leveraging a novel continuous manufacturing platform called Integrated Continuous Manufacturing (ICM), initially developed through an $85 M joint research project between Novartis and MIT. With ICM, we will improve affordability and accessibility of pharmaceuticals on a global scale. Our work is critical because the current manufacturing systems are time- and cost-inefficient, and are beset with quality problems. It is not unusual for manufacturing lead times, from start to finish, to be over one year, and studies have shown that the industry loses over $50 B annually due to wasteful processes. More importantly, these problems impact patient care. Hundreds of drugs are placed on the US FDA drug shortage website, many of which are life-saving (e.g., oncology drugs). To solve these problems, we offer a number of solutions. To achieve our goals, CONTINUUS has assembled a team of talented engineers and scientists, with skills ranging from analytical chemistry to drug formulation. Rather than producing medicines through batch-wise, step-by-step processes, ICM allows for fully continuous and automated operations, where the synthesis of the active ingredient and the final dosage form are integrated into a seamless process. This novel method will allow “on-demand” manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, improving affordability and accessibility of pharmaceuticals on a global scale.