Quality Systems

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Report from Asia

Packaging is indeed headed to be a lead sector in the Asian pharmaceutical environment, but certain challenges must first be overcome.

A Q&A with Deborah Tanner, executive vice-president and group president of R&D laboratories at Covance, on recent industry trends.

On Nov. 19, 2011, Ben Venue Laboratories voluntarily and temporarily suspended the manufacture and distribution of products made at its Bedford, Ohio, facility. These products include Doxil (doxorubicin HCl liposome injection), which the company produces for Johnson & Johnson. The company's clients include Pfizer, Hospira, and Teva.

Easy on the Alcohol!

Careful mixing during a product's distillation can help avert trouble from a strong concoction.

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The authors describe the operational qualification of test accuracy with regard to temperature drift using a thermal-compensation algorithm on several freeze dryers.

Report from Russia

Russia is aiming to provide an alternative to China and India for drug manufacturing, including APIs.

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The US Pharmacopeia (USP) proposes to lower the maximum permissible limits of trace elements in pharmaceuticals and recommends that impurities be measured through automated instrumentation-based methods. The proposed regulations specify inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (ICP–MS) and inductively coupled plasma–optical emission spectrometry (ICP–OES) as the techniques of choice. This article discusses the benefits of ICP–MS and ICP–OES for the accurate detection of trace elements in pharmaceutical products, in compliance with the proposed USP chapters.

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June and July saw three major US conferences on implementing single-use technologies: the IBC Single-use Applications meeting, the PDA Single-use Workshop and the Bio-Process Systems Alliance (BPSA) International Single-use Summit (ISUS). Jerold Martin highlights some of the key topics discussed at these meetings.