Sterilant Assays

In order to be approved for use with food or pharmaceutical applications, sterilants must be shown to be both uniformly applicable and uniformly effective. They must also leave no residues in the product or on product contact surfaces that are in violation of regulatory limits. The IEH staff is ready to partner with clients to evaluate the regulatory compliance and the effectiveness of both recognized and novel sterilants in novel application settings. This might entail screening a wide variety of microorganisms to determine the most resistant ones to the agent and comparing those resistance values to the resistance of significant pathogens. In that way, a process based on the most resistant organism of the screen would be certain to inactivate the significant pathogens.