Local Drug Delivery Company Hosts AAPS Student Chapter at R&D and Manufacturing Facilities!
Graduate students and post-docs had a unique opportunity in September to visit CIMA Labs, Inc., a local drug delivery technology company that specializes in taste-masking, rapid development timelines and commercial manufacturing (view website). We were greeted in Brooklyn Park by Derek Moe, Ph.D., senior director of R&D product development and alumnus of our Pharmaceutics graduate program, who presented an overview of the company and its fast-dissolve and taste-masking technologies. The informative seminar was followed by a tour of the analytical department where we saw row after row of HPLC systems and dissolution baths used to determine tablet potency, content uniformity and impurities, as well as tablet dissolution profiles in different media. We were then led through the GMP formulation area where we saw V-blenders and tablet presses used to make small-scale batches of tablets for R&D purposes. Our tour concluded with the manufacturing facility in Eden Prairie where we had the opportunity to observe similar formulation equipment, except on a much larger scale, and also a tablet packaging line in operation.
Overall, the tour at CIMA Labs, Inc. was an extremely valuable experience for graduate students and post-docs to see what lies beyond the academic arena. We hope to take another tour at a local pharmaceutical company in the future to see another aspect of the industry. Thanks to the overwhelming interest in this event!
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