The goal of this MIT project was to develop a compact, portable pharmaceutical manufacturing system that could be reconfigured to produce a variety of drugs on demand, anywhere- to produce drugs for an unexpected disease outbreak, to treat rare diseases, or for clinical trials.

Dave Brancazio built and led a small engineering team that, working alongside a team of chemical engineers, designed and built several of the modules in this system. The one shown here is capable of automatically preparing a precise blend of active and inactive pharmaceutical ingredients, then pressing them into tablets.