Pharmaceutical Technology Europe-05-01-2005

Asieve or screener is an essential part of every pharmaceutical production process, particularly as product quality and integrity are so important. The use of a sieve gets rid of oversized contamination to ensure that ingredients and finished products are quality assured during production and before use or despatch.

Pure water is a raw material of particular importance to the pharmaceutical industry. Drinking water is the basis for the treatment of water for pharmaceutical applications; it is the starting point for the production of the various pharmaceutical water qualities, such as purified water, highly purified water and water for injection.

The FDA initiative —Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) — is slowly gaining momentum, creating a revolution in manufacturing and testing processes that aims to ensure product quality. Its growth will encourage faster testing techniques to bring analytical testing closer to on- and at-line testing during the product manufacturing process.

Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) have become more potent, therefore the requirements of good manufacturing practice (GMP) are making ever more stringent demands on valve design and sealing. An absence of dead space, ease of cleaning and flushing is the norm for valves where cross contamination must be avoided at all costs. Sealing valves to glass reaction vessels has lagged behind valve sealing for steel vessels.

While Europe's political leaders were paying lip-service to creating a more competitive Europe at their spring summit in Brussels, European pharmaceutical technologists were tackling the serious business of turning political rhetoric into practical reality.

Improved products and processes that are cleaner, less expensive, more manageable and take up less space are benefits that you would expect to be snapped up by any industry. But not so in pharmaceutical manufacturing, where traditional methods prevail.

To help reduce the risks of operator exposure and process cross contamination of powdered materials in the pharmaceutical manufacturing environment, the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) has published ISPE Good Practice Guide: Assessing the Particulate Containment Performance of Pharmaceutical Equipment.