Microbiology Roundtable

American Pharmaceutical Review has run a 'Microbiology Roundtable' and I was invited to take-part.

Here is an extract:

Question: Looking back at the last year, what are some critical industry issues affecting efforts to detect and eliminate microbiological contaminants?

Sandle: There has been some interesting developments with microbial detection technology. As with most technological waves, developments spring from outside of the pharma sector and then become adopted later (such is the conservative nature of our sector).

It’s clear that we need platforms for rapid detection and characterization of microbial agents are critically needed to prevent and respond to contamination issues. The advancement of such technologies can help, at last, for microbial methods to fit in with the process analytical technology paradigm.

I think the area that will grow fastest is with monitoring pharmaceutical water systems for microbial contamination. This includes miniaturized biomolecular techniques and real-time monitoring systems, taking the form of online meters, such as ATP-metry and flow cytometry.

As such instruments develop, so do the key operational metrics like speed to results, identification depth, reproducibility, and multiparametricity.

Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle, Pharmaceutical Microbiology Resources (http://www.pharmamicroresources.com/)