Sterilization is an important and critical requirement for various pharma processes, where each item must be sterilized before being used.
Sterilization techniques sometimes become ineffective due to many reasons such as human involvement during transportation, or maintenance of equipment. However, recent technological advancement has enabled pharma industry to use disposable items, which are used only once and not requiring sterilization.
Single-use technology is gaining momentum because of its many advantages, which we will discuss later in this article. One of these advantages is that it eliminates the human involvement during routine processes, eliminating problems.
What is a single-use technology?
Single-use technology refers to pharmaceutical equipment designed for one-time use, and after that they discarded. Their design and physical structure do not allow them to be used again.
Additionally, treating single-use items such as sterilizing them is impossible. Doing so will alter the physical and chemical characteristics and composition.
Single use technology is an alternative to the existing traditional equipment such as stainless steel vessels, because they are used many times, and requires sterilization every time that are being used for removing contamination and microorganisms.
Single use technology components are available for the entire process life cycle, involved in pharmaceutical production such as storage, manufacturing, transferring and fluid related components. The material of construction for single is technology is plastic that is suitably composed to prevent harm and reaction with different fluids and chemical. They can also sustain different physical attributes such as pressure and heating.
Advantages
Let's discuss some advantages of single use technology
Flexibility
Flexibility means to quickly adapt to changing requirements and processes.
For Pharma operation it refers to quickly adopting to different product and operation requirements. Single Use Technology has the advantage of flexibility to adopt to different products and process requirement. Single use equipment and components can be quickly re purpose or adjusted to every individual products requirement.
The equipment or components can be installed or uninstall without any sterilization or any other requirement to become part of the process and equipment.
Single Use Technology components do not require any cleaning and related quality screening and testing.
The above characteristics of Single Use Technology provides flexibility in the routine production process, and saves a great deal of time between different stages of production processes.
More safety
Single Use Technology offers maximum inherited safety as compared to other stainless steel components. They are discarded after every processes, so traditional contamination source i.e. remaining from previous batch is automatically eliminated.
Secondly, since they are not sterilized, it automatically removes problems due to errors in the sterilization process.
Less maintenance
Single use technology components requires less or no maintenance and save resources due to maintenance.
For repairing a traditional system, dedicated resources and time is required, such as shifting the equipment to its designated maintenance place, workshop or vendor place. It also requires spare parts during maintenance. These factors, and like these increases the overall maintenance cost.
The time is also a factor in the maintenance of traditional equipment. Even, if less time is spent during maintenance, additional time is spent on testing and verifying the equipment's performance, and shifting the equipment back to production place is also a time consuming process
For large maintenance activities, time consumed is increased due to the volume o...
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