bioMerieux is pioneering a new service to provide pharmaceutical microbiology laboratories with their own isolates in a convenient, easy-to-use format.

BTF, a bioMerieux company based in Sydney, Australia, developed the BioBall® Plant Isolate service in response to changing practices in culture media quality control for validation and routine testing. BioBall Plant Isolate will enable customers to implement best practices in media QC for their critical environmental monitoring and sterility testing.

Many pharmaceutical companies are now implementing standard operating procedures that incorporate several representative strains from amongst their own bacterial and fungal isolates (from environmental monitoring, sterility or bioburden testing). Maintaining these strains in-house is time-consuming and costly compared with the QC strains such as BioBall that are available for routine use. BioBall Plant Isolate is designed to make the use of plant isolates just as convenient, easy and precise as using standard BioBall strains for quantitative microbiological tests.

Standard BioBall products are derived from strains sourced from internationally-recognized culture collections. BioBall is a small, water-soluble ball containing a precise number of micro-organisms, delivering unprecedented accuracy for quantitative microbiological quality control. More than 25 individual strains are available in standard BioBall products for applications in pharmaceutical, food and water testing industries.