The release of the FDA’s guidance on Process Analytical Technology has motivated and supported the pharmaceutical industry to deliver consistent quality medicine by acquiring a deeper understanding of the product performance and process interplay. The technical opportunities to reach this high-level control have considerably evolved since 2004 due to the development of advanced analytical sensors and chemometric tools. However, their transfer to the highly regulated pharmaceutical sector has been limited. To this respect, data fusion strategies have been extensively applied in different sectors, such as food or chemical, to provide a more robust performance of the analytical platforms. This survey evaluates the challenges and opportunities of implementing data fusion within the PAT concept by identifying transfer opportunities from other sectors. Special attention is given to the data types available from pharmaceutical manufacturing and their compatibility with data fusion strategies. Furthermore, the integration into Pharma 4.0 is discussed.

As the pharmaceutical industry increasingly adopts the Pharma 4.0. concept, there is a growing need to effectively predict the product quality based on manufacturing or in-process data. Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) have emerged as powerful tools in data-rich environments, their implementation in pharmaceutical manufacturing is hindered by their black-box nature. In this work, ANNs were developed and interpreted to demonstrate their applicability to increase process understanding by retrospective analysis of developmental or manufacturing data. The in vitro dissolution and hardness of extended-release, directly compressed tablets were predicted from manufacturing and spectroscopic data of pilot-scale development. The ANNs using material attributes and operational parameters provided better results than using NIR or Raman spectra as predictors. ANNs were interpreted by sensitivity analysis, helping to identify the root cause of the batch-to-batch variability, e.g., the variability in particle size, grade, or substitution of the hydroxypropyl methylcellulose excipient. An ANN-based control strategy was also successfully utilized to mitigate the batch-to-batch variability by flexibly operating the tableting process. The presented methodology can be adapted to arbitrary data-rich manufacturing steps from active substance synthesis to formulation to predict the quality from manufacturing or development data and gain process understanding and consistent product quality.