Increasing capacity in the NHS - Development of technologies to increase delivery of injectible medicines in the community

Aseptic compounding is an area where practice has been transformed by the emergence of more complex, personalised medicines. The demands on aseptic dispensing are continually increasing, with clinical teams relying on increasingly complex compounds for treatments given every single day.

This Prosperity Partnership aims to create a platform that will transform the future use of injectable medicines in the UK and globally. We envisage, ultimately, a range of reformulated injectable medicines suited to the setting in which they are administered, whether in the community or a hospital, manufactured through an automated process dramatically reducing the demand placed on healthcare resource required to deliver them in whatever setting is appropriate. This potentially requires a wholesale reconfiguration of compounding service in England around a hub and spoke model with high degrees of standardisation and the adaption/adoption of new approaches to automation making more efficient use of resources both in pharmacy/compounding and in the nursing workforce transforming the use of injectable medicines. Underpinning the interlinked delivery of these medicines is a continual drive for extended shelf-lives (stability), simplicity in administration, volume of manufacture, supply chain and cost reduction.

Our project focusses on the nexus of these points, considering medicine formulation, manufacture and distribution as a whole system, where elements of the compounding process can occur across different sites, with different scalability and optimisation depending on both use/requirement and shelf-life/complexity of formulation and aseptic manufacturing facility requirements. This incorporates implementing robotics manufacturing and AI into the heavily regulated area of high variation medicines production.