B&W Tek is proud to announce that its NanoLIBS® handheld laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy analyser is the winner of the 2016 Excellence in Pharma: Analysis, Testing and Quality Control category of the CPhI Pharma Awards.
The CPhI Pharma Awards Gala was held in conjunction with CPhI Worldwide on 4 October at the Fairmont Rey Juan Carlos I hotel in Barcelona, Spain. Tom Zawislak, general manager of B&W Tek, accepted the Excellence in Pharma award for the NanoLIBS on behalf of the company.
The CPhI Pharma Awards are considered one of the most prestigious recognitions in the industry. According to their website, the awards were established in 2004 to celebrate thinkers and creators breaking new ground. The Excellence in Pharma: Analysis, Testing and Quality Control category focuses on the innovations in technologies, products, processes and services in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.
As the world steadily moves towards 100% inspection and verification of incoming raw materials under the Pharmaceutical Inspection Cooperation Scheme (PIC/S), many pharmaceutical companies are turning to technologies such as handheld Raman and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to meet their analysis needs.
Current methods such as titration or laboratory atomic spectroscopy methods require lengthy preparation and analysis times and require precision and care when handling various other chemicals in the preparation process. Breakthroughs in LIBS technology now make it much easier to identify monoatomic salts which are outside the capabilities of molecular spectroscopic techniques. LIBS technology makes it possible to significantly reduce process times and the load on pharmaceutical labs while also eliminating waste associated with sample preparation, reducing costs.
Our winning product, the NanoLIBS, uses elemental analysis for the rapid identification and investigation of incoming raw material salts such as NaCl and KCl. The easy-to-use tool takes only seconds to provide rapid pass/fail results for material identification against a library of salts based on elemental composition.
With 21 CFR pt. 11 compliant software, the NanoLIBS allows companies to quickly implement a ready solution for raw material identification as a complementary tool to the NanoRam® handheld Raman spectrometer already in wide use among the industry for the identification and verification of APIs, excipients and intermediates.
The instrument comes equipped with a high brightness touchscreen, a barcode scanner, a tablet holder to simplify workflow and a tablet press for the easy creation of tablets. In addition, two batteries and a charging cradle are included to increase productivity. Data from the NanoLIBS can be transferred via Wi-Fi or ethernet to a computer to generate reports and provide traceability in a secure database.
The NanoLIBS gives pharmaceutical companies the technology they need to save them analysis time and significantly decrease quarantine and testing time.