The 40th International Forum on Process Analytical Chemistry (IFPAC) ran March 1-4, 2026 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in North Bethesda, Maryland. The forum - which positions itself as the principal North American meeting point between pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, and instrumentation vendors on advanced manufacturing science - used its 40th edition to centre programming on artificial intelligence readiness, continuous manufacturing standardisation, and the regulatory signals driving both. More than 40 sessions ran across five tracks, with exhibitors including Endress+Hauser confirmed on the conference floor.
The five session tracks were: QbD, PAT, and real-time release testing (RtRT); continuous manufacturing and risk management; Industry 4.0; control strategy and implementation; and process monitoring. IFPAC highlighted several specific themes in its published program: inspection and surveillance of facilities using advanced manufacturing techniques; digitisation and advanced sensor integration for single-use systems in cell and gene therapy (CGT and mAbs); standardisation of control strategies for continuous manufacturing; knowledge management for model lifecycle; emerging regulatory expectations; and distributed and point-of-care manufacturing. The weight given to Industry 4.0 and AI framing was consistent with the direction observed at analytica 2026 a few weeks later in Munich.
For process analytics teams, the continuous manufacturing and control-strategy tracks are the most consequential signals in the 2026 program. The standardisation question - how to write a control strategy that reviewers in the US, EU, and Japan can all interpret without site-specific translation - is now the practical barrier facing manufacturers moving from batch to continuous operations. That frames the brief for inline PAT deployments directly: the system needs to generate process understanding evidence in a transferable, audit-ready form, not only a locally optimised one.
An IFPAC Summit followed on June 9-10, 2026 at the Royal Sonesta San Juan in Carolina, Puerto Rico, providing a smaller follow-on setting for continuous manufacturing discussions outside the main annual program. Abstracts for the next annual meeting are accepted at ifpacglobal.org; the submission deadline is November 22, 2026.