Passion in Chemistry Leads to Employment in Quality Assurance

Pursuing his passion in chemistry, Ong Chih Yean decided to study an undergraduate degree in this area. He started studying for his Pharmaceutical Chemistry degree at IMU in 2010. Currently he started working with Sunward Pharmaceutical, a generic drugs manufacturing company in Malaysia, as a Quality Assurance Officer. Speaking about his responsibilities at Sunward Pharmaceutical, Chih Yean said, “As the Quality Assurance (QA) Officer, my top responsibility is to establish the quality system and to ensure the compliance of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP). In addition to that, continuous improvement is required based on several guidelines such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Pharmaceutical Inspection Convention and Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme (PIC/S) and the National Pharmaceutical Control Bureau (NPCB). Part of the activities that involve the compliance of GMP is to establish procedures and specifications which is part of my routine task for writing standard operating procedures (SOP). Apart from that periodic internal audit is also part of my job scope as it ensures the compliance of GMP of different departments throughout the company.” “Quality management involves multidisciplinary aspects, such as raw materials handling, production manufacturing, quality control, regulatory, R&D, engineering and maintenance. Hence a periodic audit is to further ensure the compliance of all departments. Another major part of my job scope is the Pharmacovigilance which includes post market surveillance, product complaints, product recall, corrective action and preventive action (CAPA) handling deviation handling. And this is pretty much of my job scope regarding to QA from Sunward Pharmaceutical.”

“The Pharmaceutical Chemistry programme can be described as a combination of pharmaceutics and chemistry, which is a programme specifically designed for the pharmaceutical industry. This has allowed me to pick up the skills in a short period of time from the knowledge that was instilled throughout the programme. Apart from the technical skills, IMU has also provided training on soft skills that has allowed me to perform well in presentation, report writing, leadership handling, research skills etc. All these experiences has helped a lot for my current job”, added Chih Yean, who intends to continue his studies and to join the Research and Development of pharmaceutical companies in new drug development.