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Making active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) requires long chains of chemical reactions and large quantities of solvents. Ask API manufacturers how they'd like to improve this process, and the responses are likely to be "make the reactions faster," "make the reactions cheaper," or "make the reactions more efficient." Then after all these economically driven answers, you might here, "make the reactions more environmentally friendly."

Recent advances in transdermal technologies challenge the paradigm that only a few drugs can be delivered transdermally.

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The EU ATEX Directive 1999/92/EC (ATEX 137) regarding the minimum requirements to protect the health and safety of workers potentially at risk from explosive atmospheres came into European law in January 2000. In the UK, the ATEX 137 Directive has been implemented as part of the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations (DSEARs), which were issued in December 2002.

The human race will have colonized Mars long before the pharmaceutical industry brings itself into the 21st century.

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A range of insect exterminator equipment has been developed to improve the level of hygiene offered to the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing sectors. Berson's Insectron range uses ultraviolet (UV-A) and green light to attract flying insects, which are sensitive to these light sources.

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The US Food and Drug Administration (Rockville, MD, www.fda.gov) released a new draft guidance that may speed generic approvals. The guidance, ANDAs: Impurities in Drug Products, describes the degradation-product information that generic drug manufacturers should include in their abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs). This clarification, FDA officials say, will help companies submit the correct information, thus increasing the likelihood that their generic drugs will be approved, and approved more quickly.

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Confronted by a challenge as vast as Hurricane Katrina, we reach for military organizations for aid and military language for description.

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It was, our GMP Agent-in-Place recalls, a typical, small, clinical-type facility... managed in the typical, informal way.

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API Sourcing

As overseas sourcing arrangements become more and more common, it may be time to look again at the advantages of having suppliers closer to home.

One of the most important skills any editor must possess is the ability to listen to their audience — without feedback, we don't get an opportunity to develop our publications; to not act on feedback shows plain ignorance. I must, therefore, give my personal thanks to the many hundreds of readers who participated in the Pharmaceutical Technology Europe (PTE) editorial and readership survey, which we conducted earlier this summer. Your comments and opinions will help us develop PTE, and we already have a number of exciting plans for 2006. Stay tuned!

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Adding Braille to pharmaceutical packaging should be less of a challenge with the use of Esko-Graphics' Scope solution. EC Directive 2004/27/CE requires Braille labelling and information to be provided with pharmaceutical products for human use, and companies are scrambling to implement this by 31 October.