Chemical Forums
Chemistry Forums for Students => Analytical Chemistry Forum => Topic started by: Kalibasa on September 01, 2011, 02:10:28 PM
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I am applying for a job with a pharmaceutical company- I'm supposed to be doing monitoring/quality assurance of the work of their chemists. I have a ton of chemical and biochemical techniques/machines I'm trained with, but I'm not sure what I should list. The job description focuses on the writing of operating procedures and the like (which I'm addressing), but it's not very descriptive on the science. It just mentions that the company does "analytical and microbiological testing," and there is a brief mention of experience with chromatographic processing software being useful.
What would be your best guesses on techniques/machines that would be used in pharmaceutical testing?
Thanks ;D
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Generally (and I do mean, only generally, some places are different than others,) Quality Assurance means documentation: the review of documents for correct performing of the procedures, correct reporting of results, correct conclusions and the like. Quality Control are the members performing procedures: in my experience, HPLC for most pharmaceuticals, GC for some active ingredients, or excipients, particle sizers are important too. Moisture determination and some wet chemistry analysis may be required as well. UV spec methods may be used, if that's the way the method is written. TLC or Raman IR may be used as a sort of pass/fail test -- if an impurity shows up, no one really tries to figure out what or why, that batch of pills is just no good. But again, QC just reports that, QA decides.
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The QA end of the job seems to predominate (that's the job title), but it is also listed jointly as QA/QC later on, so some knowledge could come into play. I know most of the techniques you listed, not all of them, but at least I have better than a blind guess on what to list. Good answer, thank you!
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The microbial end is something you might give some thought to.
Normally, pharm companies use aseptic manufacturing techniques. At the microbial end of things, this can include a total count, coliform, and (possbily) pyrogen analysis. It could possibly include cytotoxicity work, as well.
Pharmaceutical companies often group particle work in with microbial analysis. This would include particle analysis (for, as an example, a class 100,000 manufacturing environment) for aseptic manufacturing.
Good luck.