Contamination Control in Pharmaceutical Industry

Maintaining sterility and contamination control are important factors in any of the pharmaceutical industry. Most, if not all chemicals naturally contain some degree of contamination, however, even low levels of contaminants can be expensive or possibly hazardous.

In cleanroom labs, the unlikely presence of contaminants can call surprise reactions and deviate from actual results. In drug/ medical equipment manufacturing, contaminants can include toxins that convert a medicine into a poison, while infected medical devices can transmit pathogens to patients.

People came to different ways to manufacture contaminant-free products, ranging from sterilization to containment and contamination control, depending on the degree of sterilization you require. Often this combination works well both in terms of safety and efficacy.

Limiting the contamination leads to various options available in the market. From laminar airflow, sealed transfer hatches to disposable containment systems for individual processes.  They provide complementary protection against infection and avoid cross-contamination.

In the pharmaceutical industry, decontamination is the first step to proceed further. Everything from laboratory instruments to glassware and processing equipment should be sterilized. All the glass wares are sterilized in the lab with the help of autoclave. Other options include dry heat sterilizers and chemical vapour sterilizers (often using hydrogen peroxide vapour – HPV). HPV decontamination systems involve the release of hydrogen peroxide vapour (H2O2), a powerful disinfectant that combats viruses, fungi and bacteria.

Cleanrooms provide an isolated, ventilated area for safe handling of chemicals and biologicals. Cleanrooms cannot prevent contamination altogether, but help to keep contamination to a limited level, protecting cleanroom products from contamination from the environment, safeguarding chemists and researchers against hazardous chemicals and biologicals in the cleanroom, and sometimes protecting the environment at major level from hazardous substances and pathogens.