Presented at the 20^th call for projects of the FUI-Regions, the PharmaSense project, that Alphanov is a partner of, was approved for funding.

The PharmaSense project is aimed at improving drug manufacturing processes in order to meet future challenges of cost, availability and safety of pharmaceutical products.

Production and quality control methods nowadays used in the pharmaceutical industry rely on inefficient principles of batch manufacturing statistics associated with manual control. To gain efficiency, quality and flexibility and to save cost, the continuous flow production approach is being deployed but it requires radical changes in the technologies used for production and control.

The objective of the PharmaSense project is to develop and deploy on tablets, capsules and powders manufacturing lines, flexible machines incorporating new photonic sensors. These sensors, based on near infrared and terahertz technologies, "see" inside the material and will allow real time quality analysis on the production lines.

The consortium of the PharmaSense project gathers :

• Proditec, a company specialized in inspection and sorting equipment at high speed by machine vision for the pharmaceutical industry;

• Edit Laser, a company specialized in industrial technologies based on lasers, microwaves and infrared metrology;

• T-Waves Technologies, a company specialized in the development of innovative measurement solutions based on terahertz technologies;

• The technology center ALPhANOV that will bring to the project its skills in machine vision and design of complex laser and optical systems;

• The University of Bordeaux IMS laboratory. Its 'Signal and Image’ and ‘Design of digital systems’ teams are at the forefront of research on complex analysis algorithms and real-time processing capabilities.

The global budget of PharmaSense amounts to 3 412 k€. The project is expected to last 36 months. It has been certified by the Route des Lasers and the Optitec competitiveness clusters.

The ambition is to generate by 2021 sales estimated at € 40 million, with over 80% outside France, to create over a hundred direct jobs in France and to make Proditec and its partners world key players in the pharmaceutical quality sector.