A factory that produces a continuous stream of drug tablets from the raw ingredients could save time and money over traditional stop–start methods, which spread manufacture over many locations. Bernhardt Trout and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge report the first example of such a plant, an 18-square-metre factory that produces the hypertension drug aliskiren (developed by Novartis, which funded the project).

Chemical building blocks flow in at one end, followed by a series of reactions and separations in which the drug is synthesized, crystallized, dried and coated to produce tablets at the other.

Angew. Chem. Int. Edn http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201305429 (2013)