Innovation Award for Malvern’s new SyNIRgi chemical imaging system

Malvern Instruments is pleased to announce that the company has won an Innovation Award for its SyNIRgi near infrared chemical imaging (NIR-CI) system. The new award, established this year, has been given by the technical journals PROCESS, PharmaTEC and Schüttgut. Entry was open to all exhibitors at this year’s Powtech/Technopharm congress held in Nürnberg, Germany from 26-28 March. Malvern’s SyNIRgi was judged the winner in the Materials Analysis and Characterization section and the Innovation Award was presented at a ceremony held during the congress.

SyNIRgi was launched in February at Pittcon 2007 in the USA, and was shown for the first time in Europe at Powtech. Collecting the award, Malvern’s marketing manager for Europe, Renate Hessemann said: “Malvern is delighted to receive this innovation award, especially in recognition of our development work in such an exciting new area as chemical imaging.”

Mrs Hessemann went on to comment: “Chemical imaging is being used increasingly by the pharmaceutical industry and others. It is helping to address many of the challenges associated with solid dosage forms, for example, where it can be used to determine content uniformity, blending efficiency, polymorph distribution, moisture content, contaminant location and coating and layer thickness. It is also moving away from being a specialist technology to becoming a routine diagnostic tool.”

The new SyNIRgi builds on the highly successful Sapphire/NIRCI-2450 platform from Spectral Dimensions, the company that was acquired last year by Malvern Instruments. This next generation NIR-CI system adds significant additional capability in terms of data acquisition speed and new sampling options, setting a new performance standard. It will also accommodate an even larger imaging area and offers improved automation capabilities.