Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Ecevit Bilgili has been appointed as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Pharmaceutical and BioTech Industry (JPBI, ISSN: 2813-9380).

Homepage: https://chemicaleng.njit.edu/people/bilgili.php
Affiliation: Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
Interests: particle engineering; pharmaceutical nanotechnology; drug nanosuspensions and nanocomposites; amorphous solid dispersions; multi-scale process modeling; pharmaceutical unit operations; milling; granulation; spray drying; extrusion

Prof. Dr. Ecevit Bilgili is a professor, master teacher, and associate chair of the Chemical and Materials Engineering department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), USA. His Particle Engineering and Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology Laboratory conducts research in designing formulations and processes for high-value-added products like pharmaceuticals with enhanced functionalities. Before joining NJIT, he worked at Merck and Co., Inc. as a senior principal development engineer and played an instrumental role in the formulation and process development of Janumet® and other drugs in the pipeline. Prof. Dr. Bilgili served as an elected Executive Committee Member of the Particle Technology Forum of AIChE. He also served as the Chair and Vice Chair of AIChE Area3a: Particle Production and Characterization. He authored 110+ peer-reviewed journal articles, 6 U.S. patents, several invention disclosures, and has delivered 120+ national/international conference presentations and 40+ invited talks. Prof. Dr. Bilgili currently serves as an Associate Executive Editor of Advanced Powder Technology, an Editorial Advisory Board member of Pharmaceutical Research, and an Editorial Board Member of Pharmaceutics and Powders journals. He is the recipient of numerous Excellence in Teaching Awards from NJIT and the George Klinzing Best Ph.D. Thesis in Particle Technology Award from the AICHE. Prof. Dr. Bilgili was elected to the AIChE fellowship in 2022. He is in Stanford University’s list of “the top 2% of the most-cited scientists”.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Ecevit Bilgili, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role of its Editor-in-Chief?
During my five-year work at Merck and Co., Inc., I was excited about and fascinated with the complexity and multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of R&D, fast pace of the drug development, and tremendous value that pharmaceutical industry provides to health care. After joining academia, I have continued my interactions with several pharmaceutical companies via joint research and development projects. Having served on both sides of the big pharmaceutical enterprise, this gives me a unique perspective about pharmaceutical R&D. My experience shows that great research and development is being conducted at pharmaceutical companies and universities, and I wanted to serve a journal that is tailored to the needs of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry sectors while fostering communications and interactions among all three branches of the pharmaceutical enterprise: academia, industry, and regulatory/other governmental agencies and laboratories. Also, being a Founding Editor-in-Chief, I will have a chance to implement my vision.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
I want to see Journal of Pharmaceutical and BioTech Industry become a leading platform in which scientists and engineers from academia, industry, regulatory, and other governmental agencies share and complement each other’s discoveries and advance science, engineering, and technology with the goal of enhancing patient well-being. The journal’s Editorial Board should and will reflect the diversity in several aspects: technical expertise required for a multitude of sciences and engineering disciplines involved in R&D and manufacturing, gender, race, and geographic location. As a stark contrast to our sister MDPI journals Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceuticals, Journal of Pharmaceutical and BioTech Industry will have many Editorial Board Members who are scientists and engineers from industry and regulatory agencies. Hence, I want to grow the journal with diverse constituencies’ involvement. In collaboration with the Editorial Board, we will also diversify the types of papers published, not just original research articles and reviews. I would like to see a growing number of perspectives, opinions, and various types of reports such as position papers, especially those written by academic experts and industry regulatory experts and leaders. In addition, we will strive to publish selected papers from various conferences. Finally, we will emphasize Special Issues in emerging fields pertaining to the discovery, development, delivery, and manufacturing of drugs. 

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
Well, this is a great question whose answer cannot be concisely given in a short interview because the pharmaceutical research field is huge and diverse, considering all aspects of the discovery, development, delivery, and manufacturing of drugs. Exciting developments are happening in all these areas. I will just pick a few examples that are illustrative and have the widest impact. Perhaps, one huge development is in the field of modeling as applied to all the above areas. Fueled by the advances in computational power (hardware, software, algorithms, and numerical methods) as well as by the widespread use of AI-ML tools, any system (pharmaceutical phenomena, drug chemistry and interactions, equipment, process, formulation, etc.) can be simulated in silico and literal “digital twins” can be developed. The ever-increasing use of modeling and digital twins will have a revolutionary impact on pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Similarly, personalized medicine approaches and additive manufacturing–3D printing, in an integrated fashion, may revolutionize how medicines are supplied to patients. Finally, while providing safe and efficacious medicines, in an effort to enhance affordability and accessibility globally, pharmaceutical and biotech companies will continue to reduce costs including those of R&D and manufacturing, partly due to ever-increasing pressure from payors and public. From an R&D and manufacturing perspective, this will require the development/adaption, integration, or adoption of existing or emerging chemical engineering approaches such as model-aided process design, process control, process optimization and intensification, and continuous manufacturing processes. I am confident that in the near future, drug product manufacturing will become more advanced than the manufacturing of household products. The pharmaceutical enterprise has already moved in this direction, and the best is yet to come.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?
Open access has enabled wide accessibility and fast dissemination of knowledge in all branches of science and engineering, which is a positive and favorable development. In fact, recognizing the value of open access, most print journals have moved to a hybrid modality with open access options. Personally, two out of my five most cited papers appeared in Pharmaceutics, an open access MDPI journal. The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license allows authors utmost flexibility to share, copy, redistribute, and adapt their materials. Some print journals impose severe limitations on authors as to how they can share, reuse, and adapt their published materials, which is quite unfavorable to the authors. Hence, as a scientist, I support open access publishing wholeheartedly. Moreover, MDPI is a pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing. I really appreciate that MDPI offers various discounts to individual researchers and institutions, vouchers to reviewers, etc., that will help more researchers, especially those in underdeveloped countries, to participate in open access publishing.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Ecevit Bilgili and wish him every success in the position. Further details regarding the founding Editorial Board of Journal of Pharmaceutical and BioTech Industry can be found at the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jpbi/editors.