US FDA expands deployment of Waters Corporation Software to support its medical products testing labs

Waters Corporation recently announced the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA) has purchased Waters™ Empower™ Chromatography Data Software (CDS) and NuGenesis™ Laboratory Management Software (LMS), expanding its deployment of Waters’ software to support its medical products testing operations across its five field science laboratories.

Both Waters software applications will provide the ORA labs a common platform for acquiring, processing, reporting and archiving analytical data from a variety of measurement instruments. Transitioning to a fully-electronic, common data management strategy will also help ORA’s laboratories realise greater operational efficiencies and bring them closer to compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 and the National Archives and Records Administration-stated goals of phasing out paper records beginning in 2022.

“We’re extremely grateful to the FDA for putting its trust in Waters’ Empower and NuGenesis software, expanding the capabilities of its labs to centrally capture, retrieve and secure vital data for nationwide testing of medical products in the United States,” said Dr Udit Batra, President and CEO, Waters Corporation.

He added, “Since we commercialised Empower software 25 years ago, it has become the choice of numerous regulatory agencies and thousands of scientific organisations worldwide. Regulatory agencies like the FDA rely on the integrity and traceability of their lab data to help make vital decisions about the safety, purity and efficacy of drug products to help protect public health.”

In addition to supplying the software, Waters will install the computer hardware, assist with instrument qualification and software validation and train site analysts on the operation, configuration and expansion of the data management system.

ORA is the lead office for all FDA field activities. Its laboratories inspect drug manufacturers, conduct sample analyses of regulated drug products and review imported pharmaceuticals offered for entry into the US. The laboratories also perform a variety of chemical and materials analyses including High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and UltraPerformance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC™), mass spectrometry, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging, spectroscopy and thermal analysis.

The Waters Empower CDS is the world’s leading chromatography software platform with more than 250,000 licences in use today. The enterprise version of Empower software controls and collects gas and liquid chromatography data from a variety of instrumentation brands throughout a laboratory, and is a platform for assembling, reviewing, approving and publishing data in various reporting formats. The Waters NuGenesis LMS links many types of laboratory data to the business operations of the enterprise with functionality such as sample submission, results review, stability testing, scientific search, multi-vendor software connection, laboratory inventories, data retention and legal hold, and laboratory execution methods.

Both Waters Empower CDS and NuGenesis LMS are available from Waters separately or as fully integrated software applications.