In an interview recorded at IFPAC 2008, Dr Neil Lewis, Chief Technology Officer for Malvern Panalytical, and a pioneer in the field of chemical imaging, highlights the value of Near Infrared Chemical Imaging (NIR-CI) for the pharmaceutical industry. He explains how SyNIRgi, a fully automated NIR-CI system from Malvern Panalytical, is providing information that is needed for the development of increasingly complex pharmaceutical products. The interview can be seen at http://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/multimedia/2008/IFPAC_Malvern.html
In a wide ranging discussion, Dr Lewis explains how the trend towards more complex pharmaceutical products requires a more sophisticated analytical approach. NIR-CI simultaneously delivers size, shape and chemical information rather than measuring just one variable – composition or hardness, for example - making it a truly multimodal technique Researchers are increasingly recognizing these capabilities as essential for the development of products where the distribution of the active ingredient critically influences performance.
Other topics covered in the interview include: ISys, Malvern Panalytical’s powerful, industry standard, data analysis software developed to draw information from the thousands of raw spectra produced in a single NIR-CI measurement; and the impact of QbD on the uptake of new analytical solutions.