Mustard Tree Instruments, a leader in developing innovative solutions to evolving pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing challenges, shared best practices and new products to address quality control issues at the major industry tradeshow Pittcon 2012, the world’s largest annual conference and exposition for laboratory science, held from March 11 to 16.

Todd Blonshine, CEO, made a presentation twice during the event on emerging multi-variant approaches, discussing ways to obtain immediate, unambiguous results from drug product samples in addition to hosting demos of his company’s VTT-1000 and the verifier process system VPS-1000 at-line and in-process raw material testing instrumentation.

“The strength of the VPS-1000 is its simplicity of installation and setup,” Blonshine explained, pointing out that the instrument can be set up within an hour and, once activated, can begin monitoring processing within ten minutes.

The VPS-1000 performs sensitive real-time testing of liquids, powders, solids, gels, suspensions and emulsions in a variety of harsh conditions and hygienic environments and is specifically designed to fit in the most compact pharmaceutical and chemical processing locations.

“Within a week customers can see visually trackable info,” he said, adding, “We give them a high-end spectroscopy device without the entanglement of a high-end device.”

Interest in the VPS-1000 is high within the chemical industry, with Mustard Tree receiving an increasing number of requests for demos. Blonshine points to the high cost of not catching mixture problems, with just one bad batch costing a chemical company a six-figure loss. When disposal of bad batches is added into the mix, the issue of dealing with pollutants comes into play, making the VPS-1000 an attractive “green” technology option for companies with zero-waste initiatives to protect the environment and realise huge cost savings.

The VPS-1000 can operate in harsh manufacturing environments and tell what chemicals are present and how much in an easy-to-use way

Rugged and powerful, the VPS-1000 is about the size of a laptop, whereas the VTT-1000 is about the size of a coffee maker, performing non-destructive chemical identification, size, and colour analysis in benign environments.

Blonshine’s presentations at Pittcon centered on his submitted paper, “Multi-Variant Technology Combining Machine Vision with Raman Spectroscopy for Rapid Assessment of Pharmaceutical Drug Product Formulation and Dosage Strength” which he co-authored with his company’s science officer Brisco Harward, Ph.D. Both men, along with chief technical officer Brian Garrett, continue to share insight in webinars, at events, and by addressing industry groups like the Society for Applied Spectroscopy.

Mustard Tree Instruments was founded in 2009 in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina (US) with a mission to deliver customer-driven, best-in-class analytical instruments to meet the needs of underserved markets.