Pall Thor Ingvarsson
Novo Nordisk, Denmark
Biography
Pall Thor Ingvarsson has completed his PhD in the field of Pharmaceutics from University of Copenhagen in 2013 and later on his Postdoctoral Studies in collaboration with Statens Serum Insititut, Copenhagen Denmark. He has an extensive experience in the field of spray drying large molecules in academia and industry and has post his academic career worked as a Scientist at GlaxoSmithKline in the UK and Novo Nordisk in Denmark
Abstract
In the latest years, spray drying has been adopted from other disciplines as a process to convert liquid proteins/peptides into more stable dry powder drug substances and products. By removing water, the molecular motion is reduced, which hence can improve storage stability and furthermore remove stringent and costly requirements for the storage temperature. Spray drying offers certain advantages above other drying methods with a more proven track record, amongst others time, cost, scale flexibility, continuous process and particle engineering. There is though still an ongoing hesitation for the full utilisation of spray drying for manufacturing of dry powder macromolecules in the industry due to the utilisation of heat in the process. For solvent evaporation, input energy is in the form of a hot drying gas around 100-200 °C, which in the ears of a peptide/protein specialist may not sound like a recipe for success for such heat labile molecules. This presentation will however go through some common misconceptions about the spray drying process and discuss why spray drying holds a future in securing stable protein/peptide formulations. Furthermore, we will present some concrete examples showing that we shouldn’t fear the high temperature used in the process and even in some cases embrace it in order to produce high quality, stable dry powder proteins and peptides