Lucideon to Open Pharmaceutical Laboratories

Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom, April 10, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Lucideon, the leading international provider of materials development, testing and assurance, and formerly known as Ceram, is pleased to announce that it has invested £1.5M in new pharmaceutical chemistry quality control (QC) testing laboratories, at its headquarters in Stoke-on-Trent.

The investment is part of the company’s multi-million pound commitment to develop new services in both the UK and US for its clients in the Construction, Healthcare/Pharmaceutical and Power Generation sectors.

Due to officially open in April, the state-of-the-art facilities will, on completion, include both chemistry and microbiology laboratories and will be staffed by a team with many years’ experience. Services will include QC (batch release) testing, method development & validation, raw material analysis, pharmacopoeial testing (BP, Eur. Ph. USP, JP), client methods, residual solvent testing and stability storage. Full microbiology testing including sterility testing will also be offered.

Dr Richard White, Head of Testing, said: “Thanks to the work we do with many blue-chip healthcare companies world-wide, healthcare is now one of our biggest sectors. Pharmaceutical testing complements the already extensive array of materials characterisation, analysis and development that we do, something which clients will be able to benefit from. We don’t just churn out numbers we work hard to provide solutions, whether that is during product development, manufacturing or failure.”

Supporting the expenditure on new laboratories, which includes the first commercially installed 7900 ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer) in the UK, there is also a parallel investment in staff. The new pharmaceutical and microbiology team is headed up by Parmjit S Bilan who has over 25 years of analytical chemistry experience and has spent many years ‘testing’ for the pharmaceutical industry. In total the team has nearly 100 years of experience between them.

Parmjit said:
“There are many pharmaceutical laboratories out there but I believe we’re unique in that we don’t just offer routine pharmaceutical testing, we also provide a vast range of back-up analytical services, such as surface analysis. This, together with the materials development work that we do, for example in the area of inorganic controlled release technologies, can only help our clients to optimise their products, processes and, ultimately, their profits.”

For further information visit www.lucideon.com/pharma.