Flow Chemistry Supporting Access to Drugs in Developing Countries

While there are a variety of companies that formulate medicines in developing countries, there are a few active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) manufacturers with the consequence that these need to be imported from overseas; generics principally from India and China. Consequently, the medications are inaccessible to most patients due to high cost, unguaranteed supply chain and quality, as most patients fall in the low-middle income bracket in developing economies resulting in avoidable loss of life and unnecessary huge health burden. Herein, we assess how developing economies can take advantage of the limited existing batch manufacturing infrastructure to set up state-of-the-art continuous flow manufacturing infrastructure to enable local pharmaceutical manufacturing as well as support access to drug discovery. This potentially provides paradigm shift in developing countries’ pharmaceutical industry that could lead to better drug discovery access as well as enabling local drug manufacturing with the consequence of improving access to medicines.