Pharmaceutical industry imaging

Another critical factor could be image. High-technology companies like to reinforce their image by having addresses that are synonymous with education and science. Others may want to associate themselves with an area traditional for high-quality manufacturing or research and development such as in the pharmaceutical industry, which is concentrated in Switzerland. 

The Role of Near-Infrared Chemical Imaging (NIR-CI) in the Pharmaceutical Industry... 

Uses. In the semiconductor industry for the production of switches and closures the pharmaceutical industry for cardiac imaging manufacture of optical glass formerly used as a rodenticide and insecticide until banned in the US in 1972. 

For HCS to be fully accepted by academia, several conditions will need to be fulfilled. Current HCS instruments are closed black boxes and their expensive maintenance contracts do not allow any hardware or software modifications for adaptation to the diverse needs of academic research. Academic research is typically more diversified than pharmaceutical industry research and the instruments need to be more customizable than they are now. In addition, the image and data formats need to be accessible and open. In academia data is shared between collaborators and will be analyzed with various, partly custom-made software. Therefore the data needs to be accessible and open. Lastly, the yearly costs of maintenance contracts and licenses are particularly difficult to finance in academic research that relies heavily on grants. Grants typically do not cover licensing costs or if they do, when the grant runs out, new sources of funding must be found. In reality, those costs must generally be covered by institutional funds. 

A rich library of tracers exists for the dopamine Systran and perhaps also the serotonin system however, little or nothing currently exists for the assessment of many other neurotransmitter systems in the brain, some of whose receptors have been identified only recently. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are major sources not only of new compounds that target these sites as candidate therapeutics but also of compounds that may serve as radiotracers to evaluate these sites and the effects of disease and treatment. The incentive and raw materials for continued development of functional imaging of the human bram will depend on the establishment of sustained collaborations between academic and government research centers and the pharmaceutical industry. 

Chemical compound homogeneity is an important issue for pharmaceutical sohd forms. A classical spectrometer integrates the spatial information. In solid form analysis, use of a mean spectrum on a surface can be a drawback. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry it is important to map the distribution of active ingredients and excipients in a tablet so as to reveal physical interaction between the compounds and help to solve homogeneity issues. Spectroscopic imaging techniques that visualize chemical component distribution are thus of great interest to the pharmaceutical community. 

The role of near-infrared chemical imaging (NIR-CI) in the pharmaceutical industry... 

Lewis, E. N., Schoppelrei, J. W., Lee, E. and Kidder, L. H. (2005) Near-infrared chemical imaging as a process analytical tool for the pharmaceutical industry. In Process Analytical Technology (Katherine Bakeev, ed.), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. 

The increasing availability of positron emission (PET) imaging equipment as part of the normal clinical care in nuclear medicine, and incorporation of PET into the routine tools of the pharmaceutical industry, portends a growing demand for new 18F-labeled radiopharmaceuticals. It is thus expected that the methods for incorporation of the radionuclide into... 

Compounds which have non-superimposable mirror images are termed chiral or asymmetric. There are only two detectable differences between the two mirror images (or enantiomers) of a chiral compound. They rotate plane polarized light in opposite directions and they interact differently with other chiral systems such as enzymes. This has very important consequences for the pharmaceutical industry. 

In the pharmaceutical industry, the issue of better control, desirable in itself, is reinforced by the need to assure the regulatory authorities that a continuing supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) of high and reproducible quality and bioavailability can be delivered for formulation and finally to the patient. The product image (properties, purity, etc.) of this medicine must be the same as that used in the clinical testing carried out to prove the product s place in the therapeutic marketplace. Some additional comments on regulatory issues are included later in this chapter (Section 1.7). 

NIR imaging is capable of mapping areas of various chemical components in one sample this property is largely used in laboratory studies, notably in the pharmaceutical industry, although examples are also found in the food industry, occasionally on-line. 

With the introduction of more economical, large-format (320 x 256 pixels) FPA detectors, NIR hyperspectral imaging was also developed into an important tool in selected industrial areas such as the evaluation of food quality (see Chapter 8) or in the pharmaceutical industry. Most likely, the delay in implementation of NIR... 

Apart from food industry (see Chapter 8), NIR chemical imaging has so far primarily been applied to qualitative and quantitative product characterization in the pharmaceutical industry. The ability to visualize and assess the compositional heterogeneity and structure of the end products is extremely important for both the development and manufacture of solid dosage forms [20]. Hence, NIR chemical images have been used to determine authenticity, content uniformity, particle sizes and distribution of sample components, polymorph distributions, moisture content and location, contaminations, coating and layer thickness, as well as a host of other structural details [21-29]. 

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