Avoiding pitfalls with chemometrics and PAT in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries

This article is to help pharmaceutical scientists, especially those who do not specialize in chemometrics, to avoid obvious errors and pitfalls. It is also intended to inform the wider analytical community about the possibilities and the limitations of different chemometric approaches. While several of these issues can apply to the general use of chemometric tools, others are more specific to the recent increase in their use in development and manufacture of pharmaceuticals. This review covers the basics of chemometrics and critically discusses common errors and dangers encountered when uninitiated scientists apply the techniques. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.