Pharmaceutical major AstraZeneca is using an automated colony counter to save time when acquiring and sending high quality images of culture plates
Synbiosis, a world-leading manufacturer of automated microbiological systems, says that major pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is using an Acolyte automated colony counter to save time when acquiring and sending high quality images of culture plates.
Microbiologists at AstraZeneca in Macclesfield, UK are using Acolyte to automatically capture images of pour and contact plates showing contaminants isolated from pharmaceutical products, water and environmental samples.
These images are emailed to production managers, where they are used to assess whether the sterility levels of manufacturing sites are acceptable.
Karen Capper, a quality manager in the microbiology department at AstraZeneca explained: "Since many microbiologists in this department are not experts in photography, we found it difficult and time consuming to set up the digital camera to produce consistently good plate images. Therefore, three members of our team were trained to use the camera to take photographs.
They did this in batch on a weekly basis, a process that took around one or two hours a week.
The problem with this was positive plates were not being photographed immediately and we were worried that plant staff were not being alerted to contamination as soon as they could be." "We chose Acolyte because it offered a simple, affordable way of acquiring QC plate images.
As a result, our alerting process is better because everyone finds Acolyte easy to use so results are photographed and emailed as they come out of the incubator.
This gives plant personnel a much better idea of what corrective action to take before contamination problems escalate," Ms Capper added.
Simon Johns, international product manager for Synbiosis, commented: "We are pleased to see Acolyte being used by a leading pharmaceutical company in such an innovative way.
Their work shows the system is a cost-effective alternative to a light box and digital camera arrangement, which can help save microbiologists in any QC environment valuable time when capturing and sending plate images."
