UC scientists honoured for most cited paper of 2024 by leading pharmaceutical journal

The paperQuality by Design in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: A Systematic Review of Current Status, Challenges, and Future Perspectives was co-authored by three researchers from the University of Coimbra (UC) and has received the Most Cited Paper Award 2024 from the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, a prestigious pharmaceutical science journal published by Elsevier.

The study is part of Helena Bigares Grangeia's doctoral research, a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Coimbra (FFUC) and a PhD candidate in Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is also a researcher at CERES (Chemical Engineering and Renewable Resources for Sustainability), which is based in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology (DEQ/FCTUC).

This scientific article offers a systematic review of methodologies and tools to support the implementation of the Quality by Design (QbD) approach in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Developed in collaboration with Bluepharma – Indústria Farmacêutica, S.A., the study takes an industrial approach, focusing on the analysis of real-world data using advanced computational methods to optimise manufacturing processes and drive continuous improvement in pharmaceutical quality.

The research was conducted under the scientific supervision of FFUC professor Sérgio Paulo Simões and DEQ/FCTUC professor and CERES researcher Marco S. Reis, with the collaboration of Cláudia Silva.

The award will be officially presented at the 15th World Meeting on Pharmaceutics, Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology, scheduled to take place in Prague from 23 to 26 March 2026.

The scientific article is available here.

^{Translation: Diana Taborda [DCM-UC]}