LBT Innovations to partner with AstraZeneca on development of APAS Pharma microbial monitoring product
The $1 million project will see LBT develop its AI imaging analysis software for use by AstraZeneca in clinical labs.
Australian medical technology company LBT Innovations (ASX: LBT) will partner with global biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca for the full product development of its APAS Pharma artificial intelligence software.
The $1 million project will see LBT develop the Automated Plate Assessment System (APAS) analysis module for use by AstraZeneca in identifying microbial growth on settle plates used in sterility monitoring during drug manufacturing.
The module will incorporate intelligent imaging analysis software and be used on the established APAS Independence hardware platform.
The platform is already used by clinical laboratories worldwide and is expected to be deployed to AstraZeneca to support data collection and testing as part of the module’s development.
Project costs will be funded by AstraZeneca and LBT will receive payment based on pre-set technical milestones.
Exciting achievement
LBT chief executive officer Brent Barnes said the new partnership is an “exciting” achievement for the company.
“AstraZeneca leads this field and is looking to innovate its processes and set the standard for others to follow,” he said.
“Our APAS technology is ideally suited for the application of microbial quality control and is able to improve consistency of results and drive standardisation across manufacturing sites.”
Monitoring the environment
Microbial quality control is an important production process employed in monitoring critical production environments during sterile drug manufacture.
It employs settle plates which are used continuously for the detection of microbial contamination in the air.
The vast majority (over 90%) of plates show no microbial growth.
Interpretation of settle plates is subjective and relies on manual reading and reporting, which is subject to human error.
This has led to increasing data integrity requirements from regulators, including the need for independent analyst verification before results can be released.
Improvements through automation
LBT’s APAS technology has been developed to improve data integrity through automation and eliminate issues arising from manual plate reading.
It uses LBT’s state-of-the-art imaging and artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically detect growth on settle plates, creating a digital record and plate image at the time of processing to provide increased traceability of the result.
Once validated, the technology will automatically report negative results, providing improved quality control traceability of results to pharmaceutical laboratories.