Vision Inspection

Interphex 2012 will be held at New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Center on May 1-3, 2012. Headlining this event will be a series of keynote presentations presented by leading subject matter experts.

By Marie Redding
Freelance Writer

Millions of pharmaceutical products have been affected by recalls this year. Reasons have included the presence of particulates in a syringe, packaging the wrong product (such as a tablet containing the wrong dosage); out-of-spec products, and contamination by a foreign substance. Although many of these issues were caught at the wholesale level, others weren’t—and some had the potential to cause life-threatening issues for end-users or consumers.

A new system launched in Brazil at FCE Pharma is designed to offer a stand-alone solution to support different approaches to pharmaceutical product serialization. VisioCIT can handle either labeling or direct coding, reports Christoph Lehmann, director of Uhlmann VisioTec GmbH (www.visiotecamerica.com), which can position companies to meet Brazil’s pending rules as well as others around the world.

Pfizer is introducing camera-based vision inspection on five high-speed bottle filling lines at its Pearl River, NY, facility. The plant is implementing the Slat Filler Inspector from Optel Vision (Quebec City, Canada) for 100% automated inspection of solid dose multivitamin products.
 
“We saw that with this system successfully in place, we could achieve even higher quality standards. The object is to drive product quality improvements and customer satisfaction,” says John Moynihan, packaging engineer, Pfizer.