Viral Patel is Director, Product Development at Catalent Pharma Solutions in Nottingham, United Kingdom. He has more than 17 years of experience in oral drug product development spanning across industry and academia focusing on formulation development, scale up and optimisation of manufacturing processes. Over the years he has been involved in progressing small molecules through various stages of drug product approval processes from pre-clinical studies through to clinical phases 1-3 including the manufacturing of registration and validation batches. His expertise spans across the development of conventional, enabling and modified-release formulations addressing ever increasing challenges associated with new modalities such as suboptimal physicochemical and biopharmaceutical characteristics as well as the development of age-appropriate formulations to deliver patient-centric drug delivery solutions. He is a Pharmacist by training and hold masters and PhD in Pharmaceutics.