Trends And Technologies Shaping The Future Of API Manufacturing

Päivi Tolstoy is Manager, Process Development at Cambrex Karlskoga, Sweden, where she leads a team of R&D scientists. She joined Cambrex in 2012, holds a Ph.D. from Uppsala University, and completed her post-doc at Cambridge University.

Her expertise spans process scale-up from laboratory to commercial volumes, quality risk management, and the development of robust process methods through Quality by Design. She also collaborates with Stockholm University on sustainable processes through catalysis.

Asked which trends are shaping the future of API manufacturing, Tolstoy points to sustainability rather than any single technology. She expects process sustainability to become a far more prominent consideration in the years ahead, and frames the challenge as a synthetic one: how can chemists build molecules of high complexity in as few steps as possible? It is a question that sits naturally alongside her catalysis work, where step economy and efficiency are central rather than secondary concerns.