Q&A with Christopher Meissner, Meissner

Q&A with

Christopher Meissner, CEO of Meissner Filtration Products

PharmTech:

How do you stay abreast of new developments in the industry?

Christopher Meissner

Meissner:

The Internet is a huge boon that really increases our ability to link our clients, our sales teams, and our engineering teams. Of course, this creates challenges in itself just to prevent important developments from being lost in background noise. We mitigate much of this problem with good teamwork and good tools, but at the end of the day there's no substitute for continuous and direct contact with clients.

PharmTech:

Do you see a new industry trend emerging?

Meissner:

As medicines and treatments become more individually focused, and drugs are more specifically targeted, their manufacture increases in complexity, requiring greater levels of safety. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients use chemicals that require extreme efforts to minimize operator exposure, and more efficient methods of managing these processes are required. Product innovations, such as disposable filter assemblies that isolate operators not only from fluid contact, but also from vapor contact when they are changing filters, provide a way in which these chemicals can be handled safely and produced efficiently.

PharmTech:

What is the most common demand your clients are currently making of you?

Meissner:

Custom-engineered solutions for clients often require a significant amount of time for approval. Many times, approval is pushed through only days before product is needed by manufacturing. Our most common request is to expedite the delivery of these developed solutions. In addition, each client often has a slightly different approach for mitigating risk associated with any change, and we see a corresponding increase in requests for new and innovative solutions to meet their approaches.