ECA Foundation's Visual Inspection Group announces new Chairman

The ECA Visual Inspection Group's goal is to assemble knowledge on visual inspection of parenterals and share it with the community. The group was founded in 2013 by representatives of the pharmaceutical industry and GMP authorities. The members of the group's advisory board have developed a best practice guide on visual inspection which is available for all members of the group. It contains practical solutions on how to organise and carry out the 100% visual inspection of parenterals. A paper on container-/closure-/integrity testing has also been compiled and distributed within the ECA.

The board's chairman, Dr Tobias Posset (Roche Diagnostics) has been leading the Visual Inspection Group since it's beginning in 2013. He has been heading the Production Support unit in the Pharma Production at Roche in Mannheim. Herein he was responsible for the IPCs, the particle laboratory, the automated visual inspection and the coordination of the manual inspection training. Dr Posset stepped aside earlier this year and passed on the leadership of the group to his Roche colleague Felix Krumbein.

"I would like to thank you on my part and on behalf of the ECA Executive Board, for all the support you have provided for managing and leading the group", said Dr Afshin Hosseiny, ECA Foundation Chairman. "We very much value your input and efforts in preparing the excellent guidance documents which, as you know, have been received very well by our members".

Felix Krumbein studied optotechnics and image processing and started his career with the conceptual design, planning and development of GMP-compliant modular multi-camera systems for the use in the pharmaceutical industry. He was head of Inspections-Systems-Support
at Roche Mannheim, where he was responsible for the qualification of visual inspection systems. Since 2022 he is Head of Visual Inspection at InspectifAI / Körber AG, where he is responsible for the development and implementation of AI-based solutions for fully automated inspection machines.

"I look forward to working with Felix continuing on the excellent foundation they have built for this group" said Dr Hosseiny.

To learn more about the Group please visit the ECA Visual Inspection Group website.