The requirement for sterile processes and bioburden control in pharma facilities can incur high costs in terms of both filters and filter maintenance. Peter Koklitis, filtration specialist at 3M, looks at ways of improving filtration effectiveness to bring these costs down.
For today’s pharmaceutical businesses, continuous improvement of production processes is key to growing market share and maintaining profitability. The high standards for product safety and quality, which are set by regulators, place pressure on process economics. To achieve success in the marketplace, companies must strive to increase productivity while minimising batch failures, and must ensure the most efficient recovery from any such events. For processes requiring sterilising grade filtering or bioburden reduction, improving filtration performance while reducing the overall cost of filters can help meet these goals.
In processes requiring sterilising filtration performance, introducing a lower-cost pre-filter can be effective in preventing particulates from blocking the sterilising grade filter.
By offloading the responsibility for basic bioburden reduction from the main filter, the prefilter can also allow use of a smaller sterilising grade filter, thereby reducing overall filtration costs. It may be possible to save around one-third of the cost of filters in this way without compromising the integrity of the process.
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