In March 2022, the AIChE RAPID Manufacturing Institute received a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Rapid Assistance for Coronavirus Economic Response (RACER) grant to develop and demonstrate an Accelerated Modular Process Development (AMPD) framework. The project is known as RAPID RACER AMPD. The framework supports material scale-up and manufacture at the National Center of Excellence (CoE) for Chemical Process Design, currently under construction under the same grant at AVN Corp. (formerly MATRIC) in South Charleston, WV.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the weakness of the domestic supply chain in consumer products and, more critically, pharmaceuticals, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and their starting materials. The current production chain achieves low costs but accepts extended shipping times and reliance on remote suppliers. Preventing future shortages will require manufacturing options that minimize production and distribution lead times. RAPID RACER AMPD has three goals to help localized modular production close this gap:
- Develop the accelerated process development framework.
- Design and operate the modular process development CoE at AVN Corp., which will serve as a national asset testbed for future coronavirus response and a job creation hub in the underserved Appalachian region.
- Demonstrate the accelerated process development framework for an API precursor specialty chemical that is currently produced offshore.
Achieving these goals is not without difficulty, but RAPID RACER AMPD has made progress in the first two areas, as described in the following sections.
Developing the process development framework. The process development expert community has identified several key gaps and challenges to implementing modular processing. In particular, modular processing...
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