Team Creates Software To Optimize Pharmaceutical Development

Carnegie Mellon University - The development of a new medication is an incredibly complex process. From laboratory research, to testing for safety and efficacy, to setting up manufacturing and obtaining regulatory approval, the process can take up to a decade - and that's only for one pharmaceutical product. Coordinating such long and complicated processes both to ensure that they are the most resource-efficient and to guarantee that the development process proceeds without delays is the difficult job of research and development schedulers. Balancing the priorities of hundreds of researchers scheduled out for years across multiple projects can be a huge challenge. That's why Chrysanthos Gounaris , associate professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and doctoral students Hua Wang and Nikolaos Lappas, in partnership with research and development (R&D) experts from Eli Lilly and Company, have used their expertise in process systems engineering to develop an automated decision support system for planning the R&D activities within Lilly's Synthetic Molecule Design and Development organization. Their work was published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics. "Eli Lilly is a major global pharmaceutical company developing dozens of different therapeutic compounds at any given time," Gounaris said.