Chemical fingerprinting of silicone-based breast implants.

With millions of women worldwide carrying them, silicone-based breast implants represent a large market. Even though silicone breast implants already have a history of use of more than 50 years, the discussion on their safety has not yet come to an end. To improve safety assessment, regulatory authorities should have the availability of a set of tests to be able to determine parameters of implant identity and quality.

Risk analysis of analytical validations by probabilistic modification of FMEA.

Risk analysis is a valuable addition to validation of an analytical chemistry process, enabling not only detecting technical risks, but also risks related to human failures. Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) can be applied, using a categorical risk scoring of the occurrence, detection and severity of failure modes, and calculating the Risk Priority Number (RPN) to select failure modes for correction. We propose a probabilistic modification of FMEA, replacing the categorical scoring of occurrence and detection by their estimated relative frequency and maintaining the categorical scoring of severity.

Capsule shells adulterated with tadalafil.

Following a health complaint a food supplement was brought in for analysis on the suspicion of being adulterated with a synthetic drug substance. When the capsule content did not show evidence of adulteration, the capsule shell was investigated. Using HPLC-DAD and HPLC-MS the capsule shell was found to contain 2.

Consistency of FMEA used in the validation of analytical procedures.

In order to explore the consistency of the outcome of a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in the validation of analytical procedures, an FMEA was carried out by two different teams. The two teams applied two separate FMEAs to a High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Diode Array Detection-Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-DAD-MS) analytical procedure used in the quality control of medicines. Each team was free to define their own ranking scales for the probability of severity (S), occurrence (O), and detection (D) of failure modes.

The identification of rimonabant polymorphs, sibutramine and analogues of both in counterfeit Acomplia bought on the internet.

Acomplia was ordered over the internet resulting in the delivery of counterfeit Acomplia and imitation products. The tablets were analyzed for the presence of rimonabant. Using LC-DAD-MSn the presence of effective quantities of rimonabant was confirmed in samples A-D.