Pharma Adopts ProtoCOL Colony Counting and Zone Sizing Technology

The innovative Synbiosis ProtoCOL automated zone sizing and colony counting system is now being used at Saudi Arabia's leading pharmaceutical company, Jamjoom Pharma, to rapidly and accurately assess the quality of its antibiotic, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products.

Microbiologists in the Quality Control Department at Jamjoom are using ProtoCOL to look for, and count colonies of potential contaminants including, E.coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Pseudomonas and air borne fungi in their pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products. This is allowing them to continuously monitor that their aseptic manufacturing facility is operating safely under sterile conditions. They are also using the system to automatically measure inhibition zones on antibiotic susceptibility testing plates.

Dr Aamer Khatri, Senior Manager- QC at Jamjoom Pharma commented: 'We are manufacturing to GMP standards and have to check between 50 -100 plates per day. This used to involve a lot of tedious plate assessments and manual zone measuring, which was very time consuming. To help speed this process up, we assessed several different automated colony counting systems.'

Dr Aamer Khatri added: 'We chose the ProtoCOL because the way in which the software has been written means it is quick and easy to obtain and store an image of each plate and the count or measurement data together. We have to have photographic and numerical evidence to present to the regulatory agencies such as the Saudi Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other Ministries of Health when they audit our company and the fact the system does this, made the ProtoCOL stand out.'

Martin Smith of Synbiosis stated: 'We are delighted the ProtoCOL is helping microbiologists at Jamjoom Pharma to improve quality testing and speed up the release of their antibiotics. Their work shows scientists in any pharmaceutical production facility looking for automated colony counting and inhibition zone measuring which truly can be easily integrated into a GMP environment, that a ProtoCOL is the best system to trial.'