We like to encourage all of our customers to trial Enzyme Indicators for decontamination validation alongside Biological Indicators when first considering this revolutionary technology. It’s vital that pharmaceutical companies have trust in the product and a clear indication of the benefits EI’s can bring versus the traditional biological indicators.
Read on to see how Howorth Air Technology are reaping the benefits of their EI vs BI head to head trial and their views as to the future use of Enzyme Indicators.
Dear Protak,
I’m writing to give an overview of our recent trials and comparative study of Enzyme Indicators vs Biological Indicators. We have now completed our first complete gassing cycle development on three pieces of equipment and used EI’s initially alongside BI’s and then relied upon EI’s to develop cycles. From the very first cycle it became clear that Enzyme Indicator technology offers a huge advantage. The ability to read EI’s instantly enabled us to understand the gassing cycles at a new level, creating a new dimension in terms of data that really helped us to save time and tailor the cycles very quickly. We were able to see the least penetrative locations immediately and this in turn allowed us to save many days waiting for BI’s results.
Being able to instantly see a log reduction reading this enabled us to increase cycle parameters instantly and run back to back cycles until we achieved a log 6+ reduction in all areas, this would typically take two – three weeks using BI’s to collect the data in all three chambers, using EI’s we was able to collect the data over a two day period, this will be significant improvement going forward potentially saving up to four weeks on each project.
For information, we found that another clear advantage of using EI’s alongside BI’s for final cycle development helped nullify some issues we had with the actual BI’s themselves. Having a stable and repeatable indication from the EI’s supported us and the cycle development very well and we will certainly be using EI’s into the future.
Best regards, Shane Stevenson,
BioGen product development manager.
Howorth Air Technology
