news
On-line particle monitoring A picture is worth a thousand words, but in drug manufacturing, an instant snapshot of the process can be worth both time and money. In the April 15 issue of Analytical Chemistry (pp 1777– 1785), John Higgins and colleagues at Merck Research Laboratories describe a novel application of near-IR spectroscopy to capture a nearly instant snapshot of submicrometer-sized particles of a drug. Whereas the traditional technique for measuring particle size—laser light scattering—can take 2–5 h to obtain data, the group’s near-IR method can detect particles with diameters of
