Australian medical technology company LBT Innovations has partnered with global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to develop artificial intelligence software that would be used in drug manufacturing.
The two companies will undertake a full product development project for LBT’s new Automated Plate Assessment System (APAS) Pharma analysis module, which will be used on the APAS Independent instrument.
AstraZeneca will fund the development of the APAS Pharma analysis module and validate the final product for their processes.
The module will be designed to identify microbial growth on settle plates used in sterility monitoring during drug production, LBT said in an ASX announcement.
The module’s development is expected to cost approximately $1 million, with payment received based on achieving a series of technical milestones.
LBT’s APAS Independence, an established hardware platform already developed and used by clinical laboratories, will be deployed to AstraZeneca to support data collection and testing.
Microbial quality control is a crucial production control process aimed at monitoring the environment during sterile drug manufacturing. During this process, settle plates are used continuously for the detection of microbial contamination in the air.
APAS Pharma leverages LBT’s proprietary imaging and artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically detect growth on settle plates, creating a digital record and plate image at the time of processing, thus allowing increased traceability of the result.
Once validated, APAS Pharma will then automatically report negative results, providing an important time-saving and improved quality control traceability of results to pharmaceutical laboratories.
“This partnership is really exciting for the Company. AstraZeneca leads this field and is looking to innovate its processes and set the standard for others to follow,” said Brent Barnes, chief executive officer and managing director of LBT.
“Our APAS technology is ideally suited for the application of microbial quality control, able to improve consistency of results and drive standardisation across manufacturing sites,” Barnes added.
