Digitalization in Processes.

Digitalization is having an increasing impact on all industrial sectors, including the chemical and biotechnological industries. Aiming for innovative research and development, the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences play a pivotal role in transferring academic knowledge and know-how to industrial practice. We review selected examples of projects related to the digitalization of processes and bioprocesses at four different institutions across Switzerland. These developments cover the whole spectrum of digital technologies, including big data, connectivity, analytics and automation. They are conducted in close collaboration with industrial partners and aim to support the growth of this important industrial sector.

Rational Selection of Bio-Enabling Oral Drug Formulations - A PEARRL Commentary.

New drug candidates often require bio-enabling formation technologies such as lipid-based formulations, solid dispersions, or nanosized drug formulations. Development of such more sophisticated delivery systems generally requires higher resource investment compared to a conventional oral dosage form, which might slow down clinical development. To achieve the biopharmaceutical objectives while enabling rapid cost effective development, it is imperative to identify a suitable formulation technique for a given drug candidate as early as possible. Hence many companies have developed internal decision trees based mostly on prior organizational experience, though they also contain some arbitrary elements. As part of the EU funded PEARRL project, a number of new decision trees are here proposed that reflect both the current scientific state of the art and a consensus among the industrial project partners. This commentary presents and discusses these, while also going beyond this classical expert approach with a pilot study using emerging machine learning, where the computer suggests formulation strategy based on the physicochemical and biopharmaceutical properties of a molecule. Current limitations are discussed and an outlook is provided for likely future developments in this emerging field of pharmaceutics.

NaSn5 : An Intermetallic Compound with Covalent α-Tin and Metallic ß-Tin Structure Motifs.

A novel and unusual three-dimensional network of tin atoms is present in NaSn5 , in which metallic layers analogous to those in ß-Sn alternate with tetravalent units analogous to α-Sn. The compound shows the emergence of pentagonal-dodecahedral units from the metallic ß-Sn modification (see structure on the right; all unlabeled spheres are Sn atoms). Quantum-mechanical investigations indicate the simultaneous presence of structural regions with localized and delocalized bonds.