Courses offered and Key Staff at the University of Lille (ULille)

At the University of Lille (France), the courses will be offered for Track 1 “Pharmaceutical Materials Science” (1st and 3rd semesters) of the BIOPHAM Master Programme. Courses will be jointly delivered by physicists and pharmacists (see staff description below). These courses will focus on materials commonly used in pharmacy, including active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and excipients, exploring their physical states, modes of preparation, and transformations under the constraints of industrial processes. The very rich equipment available in the two teams involved will be made available to students in the framework of the training programme (advanced experimental characterization and miniprojects in lab. At the Physics Department, the partner houses many equipment including 2 X-ray diffractometers, 10 calorimeters, 1 broadband dielectric relaxation spectrometers and 2 Raman spectrometers. TEM/SEM, single crystal diffractometers, NMR spectrometers are also available at the Michel-Eugène Chevreul platform. At the college of Pharmacy, pharmaceutical systems can be prepared using a very broad range of techniques (direct compression of drug-polymer blends, fluidized bed coating, extrusion, spray-drying and freeze-drying devices) and characterized in vitro with a large variety of physicochemical and biological methods (e.g., in vitro drug release measurements, differential scanning calorimetry, size exclusion chromatography, mechanical analysis, cell culture tests, biocompatibility and bioerosion studies). The possibility of obtaining essential information on the preparation of pharmaceutical materials and their physical characterization (structure, dynamics and thermodynamics) is at the heart of BIOPHAM's excellent training in Lille. Students will also acquire in-depth knowledge of numerical atomistic methods including artificial intelligence, atomic scale computations and mathematical modelling approaches tailored to the study of these materials. The teaching will be enriched with examples from real-world applications in pharmaceutical industries. This multidisciplinary education bridges materials science and pharmacy, emphasizing research in pharmaceutical formulation.  The partner has many research projects with industrial partners (AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Servier/Oril, Sanofi, Roquette,…) ensuring they remain highly recognized in their fields and up-to-date with the latest scientific advancements. This approach ensures continuous adjustment of the course content in response to day-to-day scientific discoveries.

Project team at University of Lille (ULille)

At the University of Lille (France), the key staff involved in the BIOPHAM programme are professors, researchers, research engineers, administrative personnel from the Physics Department (about 200 staff members) of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, and the College of Pharmacy (about 240 staff members). Courses will be therefore jointly delivered by physicists and pharmacists. All key staff involved belong to two teams:

• The “Therapeutical Molecular Materials” team (Physics department, Materials and Transformations Unit (UMET) laboratory). Research activities of the staff members focus on the physical state of molecular materials composed of small molecules and/or of biological molecules of pharmaceutical interest under various stresses: temperature, pressure, grinding, dehydration. The main goal is to analyse the situations of metastability, the glassy states and the phase transformations and out-of-equilibrium evolutions induced by these stresses.
• The “Advanced Drug Delivery Systems” group (INSERM U1008), a research unit jointly administered by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). The team works on advanced drug delivery systems and biomaterials including coated pellets orally administered and designed for site specific drug delivery to the colon, biodegradable microparticles for parenteral administration for the treatment of brain diseases or lipid implants for the controlled delivery of fragile protein drugs.