Microanalysis in Pharmaceutical Product Development and Trouble-Shooting

The demand on the quality of pharmaceutical products is very high. Raw and packaging materials as well as intermediate and final products must contain the correct components and need to be free from contaminations. In quality control analytical methods like Mid- and Near-IR spectroscopy and others allow to verify an overall correct identity and composition of the sample. However, contaminants like particles in liquid formulations or inclusions in tablets are often extremely small and cannot be detected selectively by such macroscopic methods. Therefore further analytical methods are needed to determine the accurate chemical nature of the particle or inclusion – valuable information that allows to find the source of contamination.