Panasonic Cuts CO2 Incubator Decontamination Time to Under 3 Hours

Successful cell culture relies on the maintenance of strict environmental conditions and scrupulous contamination control. Panasonic CO₂ Incubators are designed to provide optimum conditions for cell culture and a hydrogen peroxide vapour decontamination option now enables complete decontamination while limiting incubator downtime to less than 3 hours. The H₂O₂ system comes as an option with Panasonic MCO-19AIC CO₂ and MCO-19M multi-gas incubators, providing an automated decontamination cycle that is both safe to use and provides evidence of compliance. 

Compared with standard heat decontamination, the ability to achieve full decontamination and cleaning of the incubator in less than half a day offers significant time savings, reducing downtime and enhancing productivity. During the low temperature H₂O₂ process all interior components, as well as the external CO₂ sampling loop, are decontaminated in situ. This eliminates the need for the separate autoclave cycle required when using heat treatment. Importantly, the H₂O₂ process does not expose the sensor to repeated high temperature cycles. Following a 7-minute H₂O₂ vaporisation, 90-minutes of UV illumination reduces the H₂O₂ to water
vapour and oxygen.

As the H₂O₂ system is fully verified as a method of decontamination it is especially suitable for use in highly demanding pharmaceutical and biotechnology applications, such as monoclonal antibody production.