Whitepaper: Chemical characterisation of diverse pharmaceutical samples by Confocal Raman Microscopy

Confocal Raman Microscopy (CRM) is extremely useful for drug substance design, for patent infringement and counterfeit analysis.

The development and production of drug delivery systems requires efficient and reliable control mechanisms to ensure the quality of the final products. These products can vary widely in composition and application. Therefore analyzing methods that provide both comprehensive chemical characterisation and the flexibility to adjust the method to the investigated specimen are preferred in pharmaceutical research.

Confocal Raman Microscopy (CRM) is a well-established and widely-used spectroscopic method for the investigation of the chemical composition of a sample. In pharmaceutics, CRM can be used to probe the distribution of components within formulations, to characterize homogeneity of pharmaceutical samples, to determine the state of drug substances and excipients and to characterize contaminants and foreign particulates. The information obtained by CRM is also extremely useful for drug substance design, for the development of solid and liquid formulations, as a tool for process analytics and for patent infringement and counterfeit analysis. Being a non-destructive method there is the opportunity to combine CRM with other imaging techniques such as Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) or fluorescence analysis.