Medical Device Testing Lab Acquires Accelerated Aging Chamber

In July 2024, Canyon Labs installed a new accelerated aging chamber, which is in the process of being validated with an expected completion date in early August.

Historically, the company has served as a regulatory consulting, microbiology, and analytical chemistry test lab servicing clients with sterility assurance, bioburden, ethylene oxide residuals, extractables, and leachables, and more. With the addition of these chambers, Canyon Labs will complete its newest division: the ISO 11607 packaging validation test lab.

“After years of aiding in the launch of new technologies in healthcare, we found that fast, customer service oriented, full-service testing labs were hard to come by,” says Wendy Mach, senior director, technical services. “To solve this, we decided to add package testing to complete our end-to-end service offering for medical device and pharmaceutical companies.”

Mach shares that packaging validation is Canyon Lab’s final piece of the puzzle to have a testing solution for all of its clients’ needs within the product lifecycle.

Uniform temperature & humidity.

The unit, which is the first of four to arrive, has a capacity of just over 600 cubic feet, allowing for pallets and individual box configurations. These chambers and their large capacity will give clients options for temperatures and fast lead times for starting testing.

The chambers are set at specific temperature and humidity setpoints that accelerate shelf-life stability studies. This unit will run at 55 degrees Celsius and 50% relative humidity and will serve as an option in the company’s ASTM F1980 offering.

One of the features that Mach finds most impressive is how tight the uniformity of the temperature and humidity are across the unit. The values are well below industry expectations.

“We are still trying to figure out how to activate the ‘reverse’ aging feature,” she jokes, “but we will be sure to call Hollywood once we launch that offering.”