World Pharma Today recently featured Inorganic Ventures in the article, "Trace-Level Testing, Validation Pressure, and the New Demands on Pharma Labs," written by Brian Alexander, PhD, president of Inorganic Ventures, examining how pharmaceutical labs are adapting to tighter impurity thresholds and faster development timelines. (worldpharmatoday.com)

The article explores how sample preparation, digestion, calibration alignment, traceability, and method validation all influence whether elemental impurity data can withstand regulatory scrutiny — and why laboratories rely heavily on certified reference materials and calibration standards to establish traceable instrument r

A bottle of olive oil or a tanker of refined soybean oil looks simple enough on the label, but at the parts-per-billion level, it's a surprisingly complicated matrix to analyze. Trace metals in edible oils matter for two very different reasons — food safety and shelf life — and both push laboratories toward lower and lower detection limits. For labs running ICP-OES or ICP-MS on oils, that means calibration standards have to keep up.

Two reasons trace metals matter in oils

The first reason is toxicology. Regulatory bodies including the EU (Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915) and Codex Alimentarius set maximum levels for lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury across food categories, and fats and oils are no exception — lead limits for most fats and oils sit near 0.1 mg/kg, with correspondingly tight limits for the other regulated elements. Meeting these limits with confidence requires a method whose detection limit sits comfortably below