PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Hans Joachim Anders
AU  - Daniel Mannle
AU  - William Carpenter
AU  - Wolfgang Eder
AU  - Ivana Heckel
AU  - Tobias Gotzen
AU  - Corinne Oechslin
AU  - Cedric Joosen
AU  - Maria Eugenia Giribets Parra
AU  - Jason Rose
AU  - Vaishali Shah
AU  - David L Jones
TI  - Multisite Qualification of an Automated Incubator and Colony Counter for Environmental and Bioburden Applications in Pharmaceutical Microbiology
AID  - 10.5731/pdajpst.2022.012742
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - PDA Journal of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology
PG  - pdajpst.2022.012742
4099  - http://journal.pda.org/content/early/2022/11/15/pdajpst.2022.012742.short
4100  - http://journal.pda.org/content/early/2022/11/15/pdajpst.2022.012742.full
AB  - Traditional microbiological techniques have been used for well over a century as the basis for contamination testing of pharmaceutical products and processes. With more recent focus on faster product release and concerns around integrity of the test data, new technologies have been implemented to detect and enumerate organisms faster and provide paperless processes to minimize data integrity issues. Manual colony counting technologies, where incubation is performed in a standard incubator and the plate manually transferred to the colony counter for a single read at the end of incubation, have been used for many years to reduce the potential for human error, however, they pose validation challenges due to poor counting accuracy. Colony counters that automatically perform both the incubation and enumeration functions (multiple enumeration calculations through the incubation phase) have recently been implemented for QC laboratory analytical processes, supporting a cGMP environment. This paper summarizes the findings of eight companies demonstrating the qualification of an automated colony counter technology to perform the majority of microbial tests required for QC, environmental monitoring, bioburden for in process, bulk drug substance and water system testing. Comparable analytical performance and time to result data generated during individual studies at all companies allows the system to be qualified and implemented for cGMP processes while reducing data integrity risks.