ESR Project 5

Technology selection for bottom-up manufacturing of stable, aqueous nanocrystal suspensions for new classes of APIs

PhD awarded by:

University of Limerick, Ireland

Placement:

Janssen (18 months), University of Limerick (15 months), Technische Universität Dortmund (3 months)

Supervisors:

Alain Collas (Janssen), Luis Padrela (UL), Lidia Tajber (TCD)

Eligibility Criteria:

Minimum BSc in chemical engineering, physical chemistry or related discipline
Applicants must not have resided or carried out their main activity in Belgium for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the date of application.

Start Date:

September 2020

Project Details

The objective of this project is to validate the toolboxes and technologies developed by the other ESR’s in projects 1-4 and apply their findings and methodologies to optimally guide the selection of the most appropriate bottom-up technology and excipients to obtain suspensions with tailored properties for new types of APIs.

Based on the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of the complex systems, the ESR will identify and validate the attainable size ranges and limitations of the different processing routes and predictive in silico approaches for the relevant phenomena e.g. time constants for nucleation/growth kinetics and effective surface poisoning/affinity of the selected excipients resulting in nanosuspensions possessing different physical and chemical qualities and stabilities. ESR 5 will also explore more generic applicability of modelling and excipient selection tools across bottom-up and top-down manufacturing methods for nanosuspensions.

A generalized experimental workflow and decision tree for technology platform and excipient selection for the development of aqueous suspensions will be developed. The derived methodology will be the result of the investigation of proprietary Janssen compounds in addition to the insights gained on model APIs by ESR 1-4.