The Challenge of Measuring Total Organic Carbon In Modern Pharmaceutical Water Systems

Total Organic Carbon (TOC) is one of the quality attributes defined in the European and USA pharmacopoeias for pharmaceutical waters. Modern water treatment systems can deliver such high purity water that TOC levels can be consistently close to zero and very difficult to measure with any accuracy. This paper discusses some of the challenges when using TOC analysers to demonstrate pharmacopoeial TOC level compliance for modern water systems in the light of the ICH Q2 document from the International Conference on Harmonisation.