Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Real-time bioburden monitoring promotes risk reduction and process control
Water is utilized abundantly to process, formulate, and manufacture pharmaceutical products. Traditional culture-based methods used to ensure water quality, however, are ill-suited in providing a robust assessment of risk and control. These methods are plagued by limitations in sensitivity, episodic sampling, and retrospective results. New technologies based on laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detect intrinsic fluorescence instead of growth, can operate continuously, and deliver real-time results. As applied to pharmaceutical water quality, LIF-based, instantaneous microbial detection technologies enable real-time bioburden monitoring, risk reduction, and process control.
- Allison Scott, Ph.D.