The Touchless Environmental Monitoring Solution is aimed at providing a history of each component's history and chain of custody to better manage its use and location, as well as what items or products were located around it in the event of a contamination. Items being tracked include agar exposure plates, cleanroom airflow monitoring filters, finished drug components, and raw materials and components used to monitor the environment.

Tego's environmental-monitoring solution includes a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tag that stores data written directly to it, as well as fixed or handheld readers from a variety of vendors, and Tego's Asset Intelligence Platform (AIP) software to manage the collected read data. By using the solution with high-memory Tego tags, multiple entities can have access to the data written on the tag itself, even if they lack access to the software, says LaVerne Cerfolio, Tego's marketing vice president.

The technology was developed as a solution for pharmaceutical companies to track such assets as the hundreds or thousands of agar exposure plates that they use to prevent contamination while making medications and vaccines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that companies follow Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP) by certifying that every vaccine, drug or biologic product is produced in a safe and controlled environment. The plates are used to identify if any mold or other contamination takes place, thereby identifying a problem before it can reach a finished product or a patient.

RFID enables the tracking of those plates. However, because they are often moved from one workstation, lab or manufacturing facility to another, the plates can be the responsibility of multiple parties, who may or may not have access to a single software platform.

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