Lab Overview
The Pharmaceutical Technology Laboratory at UNIC Athens is a bench-scale formulation, manufacturing, and dosage-form performance environment designed to connect pharmaceutical design with measurable product behaviour. Its role is to train students and support applied research across the full logic of pharmaceutical development: from material selection and formulation strategy to prototype manufacture, quality assessment, and performance interpretation.
The laboratory occupies a strategic position within UNIC Athens Labs by bringing together pharmaceutics, biopharmaceutics, materials science, process development, analytical control, and patient-oriented dosage-form design. Students work with real formulation systems and manufacturing-relevant equipment, gaining exposure to the practical decisions that determine whether a pharmaceutical concept can become a stable, manufacturable, and clinically usable product.
Its educational value lies in making pharmaceutical technology tangible. Students do not simply study dosage forms theoretically; they prepare, process, test, compare, and interpret them. The laboratory supports training in tablets, capsules, powders, suspensions, emulsions, gels, creams, ointments, and emerging personalised dosage forms, including 3D-printed pharmaceutical prototypes. This creates a strong foundation for careers in industrial pharmacy, formulation development, pharmaceutical quality control, regulatory sciences, and translational product innovation.
Research & Innovation Focus
The laboratory enables teaching and applied innovation in solid, liquid, and semi-solid dosage forms; controlled-release and modified-release systems; powder technology; particle engineering; compounding; galenic formulation; and pharmaceutical product performance testing. It is particularly relevant to projects where formulation decisions must be linked to measurable outcomes such as dissolution, disintegration, friability, hardness, rheology, moisture content, particle-size distribution, uniformity, and drug release.
The inclusion of tableting, capsule filling, milling, blending, sieving, tapped-density assessment, high-shear dispersion, homogenisation, sonication, rheological analysis, and freeze-drying gives the laboratory a coherent bench-scale development workflow. Students and researchers can move from raw material handling to prototype dosage forms and then to quality-relevant testing.
The laboratory also supports innovation in patient-centric formulation, including age-appropriate medicines, adherence-supporting dosage forms, reformulation of existing products, and early exploration of personalised or small-batch manufacturing through 3D-printing technologies. These capabilities align with the evolution of pharmacy from conventional compounding toward precision formulation and digitally enabled pharmaceutical production.
Core Capabilities
The laboratory supports bench-scale development and evaluation of tablets, capsules, powders, granules, suspensions, emulsions, creams, gels, ointments, and other pharmaceutical formats. Manufacturing and processing capabilities include tableting, manual capsule filling, mini cone-milling, blending using a Turbula mixer, analytical sieving with ISO sieve sets, tapped-density measurement, magnetic and overhead stirring, high-shear homogenisation, ultrasonic homogenisation, and controlled heating.
Dosage-form performance testing is supported through dissolution testing, disintegration testing, friability testing, tablet hardness testing, digital caliper or thickness measurement, and moisture analysis using Karl Fischer titration. These systems allow students to understand how formulation composition and processing parameters affect product quality, manufacturability, and pharmacopeial performance.
Physicochemical and analytical characterisation capabilities include UV-Visible spectrophotometry with quartz cuvettes, FTIR spectroscopy with ATR and/or pellet capability, KBr die set and hydraulic press support where required, rheometry/viscometry, thermometer and hygrometer monitoring, HPLC-based workflows, analytical and precision balances, and centrifugation using 1.5 mL and 50 mL rotors.
The laboratory also includes general and enabling infrastructure such as freeze dryer with pump, autoclave, water bath, magnetic stirrers, hotplate stirrers, and related formulation support equipment. 3D printers extend the laboratory’s capabilities into prototype design, personalised dosage-form development, and teaching of emerging pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.
Together, these capabilities allow students and research teams to move from formulation concept to measurable pharmaceutical performance. The laboratory is designed to make formulation decisions evidence-based, reproducible, and aligned with the realities of pharmaceutical development, quality assurance, regulatory expectations, and patient use.
Collaboration Opportunities
The Pharmaceutical Technology Laboratory is positioned for collaboration with pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, medtech developers, compounding pharmacies, formulation startups, excipient suppliers, digital manufacturing partners, and academic research groups. It can support early formulation feasibility, prototype development, comparative dosage-form testing, reformulation studies, student-industry projects, and selected contract-research activities where bench-scale pharmaceutical development is required.
Its strongest collaborative value lies in bridging scientific concept and product performance. The laboratory can help partners explore whether a candidate compound, delivery strategy, excipient system, manufacturing approach, or patient-centred formulation can be developed into a credible pharmaceutical format with measurable quality attributes.
