Thermo Fisher Scientific and Siemens collaborate on spectroscopy for drug development and manufacture

April 7, 2009--Thermo Fisher Scientific (Madison, WI) has combined the Thermo Scientific Antaris family of Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectrum analyzers and SIEMENS SIPAT software platform to provide a comprehensive solution for advanced process understanding and continuous control and improvement in drug development and manufacture (see also "Wide-field Raman chemical imager aims to help generic drug makers achieve 'first to file' status" and "Spectroscopy shines at Pittcon 09").

The integration is a natural extension of the Antaris analyzer product line, and is designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to further extend the capabilities of the FT-NIR analyzers to achieve better process insight, real-time product release, improved manufacturing performance, and enhanced quality while maintaining regulatory compliance. This initiative creates a solution tailor-made to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry that seamlessly migrates process analysis from the laboratory into production, effectively mitigating risk and is intended to drive significant cost-savings.

"We believe that the collaboration between SIEMENS and Thermo Fisher Scientific represents a great step forward in advancing process control in the pharmaceutical industry," said Dr. Jeffrey Hirsch, NIR product manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific. All of the Antaris FT-NIR analyzers are built from the ground up to suit the specific requirements of the pharmaceutical industry. They include internal calibration standards that allow instrument qualification without having to stop the process or remove the probe from the culture media. With features like a flex-pivot interferometer and pinned-in-place optics inherent in the analyzers, each scan of the samples is the same as the last one, providing accurate, precise, and reliable measurements.

For more information, go to www.thermo.com/nir or www.siemens.com/sipat.

--Posted by Gail Overton, [email protected]; www.laserfocusworld.com.