What is Intellicentic™?
Intellicentic™ refers to a broad mix of consulting services and advanced platform technologies developed in concert with key pharmaceutical manufacturing suppliers, service providers and Pfizer Incorporated’s experience and broad manufacturing knowledge. These platforms are based on technologies developed for Pfizer internal use. The main focus of the Intellicentic solutions is on de-risking the processes, reducing variation, improving yield, costs, cycle time and overall agility and predictability of manufacturing processes.
What are the key benefits of Intellicentic™ for Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry?
Pfizer’s primary interest in Intellicentic™ is to promote technology uptake in the industry. A broader uptake of these technologies will accelerate regulatory awareness and acceptance that will in turn benefit Pfizer and eventually the patients. Development of Intellicentic platforms has required significant investment over a seven-year period, and a critical mass of highly specialized subject matter experts in key areas of science and technology: advanced integrated PATs, applied multivariate analysis, advanced process control and real-time optimization. Open access to these mature and proven technologies will provide significant benefit to other Pharma companies without the need to replicate such an undertaking.
Are Intellicentic™ Platforms affordable for smaller companies?
The value proposition of Intellicentic is based on impactful and measurable process improvement and short payback periods (in many cases less than two years). Our vision is to make transformational technologies more accessible to the entire industry and create a new technical benchmark to fuel future growth.
What is Intellicentic’s business model?
Inspired by open innovation principles, the Intellicentic model is based on a non-competitive collaboration between Pfizer and a number of technology providers. Currently, the partnership includes Perceptive Engineering, Ltd. (www.perceptiveapc.com), Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. (www.StottlerHenke.com), Middleton Research (www.middletonresearch.com), Metrohm USA, Inc. (www.metrohmusa.com), and Federal Equipment Company (www.fedequip.com) who will represent Pfizer in any customer facing interaction. These companies were selected based on the maturity and complementary strength of their products and services, and our long-standing experience with each of them. We are currently considering a few other companies, including a number of top biopharmaceutical equipment manufacturers, who could offer additional synergy to this model.
What are the key benefits for your Intellicentic partners?
Intellicentic™ provides an additional marketing avenue to our partners and an extension to their existing product portfolio, without the need for any investment to develop these capabilities in-house. The collaboration between partners will fuel open innovation and is a true win-win for all concerned including future adopters in industry.
Walk us through a specific example of how this technology is applied.
One of the Intellicentic platforms is designed to reduce the time and efforts needed to optimize crystallization processes from lab to commercial manufacturing. The ProCrystal Intellicentic Platform is a generic solution that can be interfaced with different scale crystallizers. It combines PAT and other traditional sensors with adaptive temperature and process control to automatically establish the crystallization metastable zone for any API and create an optimal super-saturation trajectory for the desired particle size distribution and morphology. The system can provide significant improvement in crystallization consistency, and in many cases, a significantly shorter maturity cycle time.
How Intellicentic™ approach differs from traditional biopharmaceutical technologies?
Many traditional manufacturing processes in our industry lead to high costs and increased energy consumption because they lack modern measurement and control capabilities and hence are designed to cope with “worst case” scenarios. This approach results in over-processing, conservative scheduling, and excessive inventories. Intellicentic™ approach is based on modern predictive and adaptive capabilities that enable robust process understanding, enhanced process monitoring, early fault detection and timely corrective actions for process recovery.
The utilization of such technologies does not necessarily result in a regulatory impact, and provide significant potential for improving the manufacturing performance.
According to a document released by the White House, advanced technologies such as our’s “can both revitalize existing manufacturing industries, and support the development of new products in emerging industries.” Today’s rapid progression of new technologies means that the design and deployment of smarter, more intelligent systems is easier and more cost effective than ever before. In other words, there has never been a more apt time for manufacturers to invest in improving performance and business metrics.
Is the scope of Intellicentic™ limited to process control?
No. Intellicentic™ offers a multiple of solutions that cover manufacturing at production, plant, and enterprise levels. At the process level, Intellicentic™ platforms target yield, cycle time, throughput, and production cost. At the plant and enterprise level, the focus is on transforming labor intensive and challenging activities like scheduling, changeovers, resource optimization and inventory and supply chain management.