(274e) Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste:  RAPID RACER AMPD and the Opportunity to Accelerate Modular Process Development

As announced on March 7, 2022, the RAPID Manufacturing Institute^® (an AIChE entity and one of the Manufacturing USA Institutes) was awarded $4.64MM by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a testbed for domestic manufacturing of critical pharmaceutical ingredients. The testbed will be located in the underserved Appalachian region in South Charleston, WV. The project is funded under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, also known as the COVID-19 Stimulus Package.

The planned test bed program presents an opportunity to accelerate chemical process development with modular processing and demonstrate its potential for rapid deployment of distributed manufacturing. RAPID RACER AMPD will also deliver a process development methodology to support the design and operation of modular facilities. We will present the results of our benchmarking survey on the current state of process development, based on input from AIChE’s Process Development Division, Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum, and RAPID members. We will also discuss the implications of the survey results on the AMPD methodology and review the overall status of the project.