Your source for news, trends and analysis of pharmaceuticals, biologics, medical devices, and nutraceuticals.

Two pharmaceuticals and one medical device package were among those to win the Institute of Packaging Professionals’ 2007 AmeriStar Awards. In the Pharmaceutical and Drug category, Mylan Pharmaceuticals chose MeadWestvaco Health & Beauty Packaging’s Shellpak (shown) to answer Wal-Mart's challenge to its generic prescription drug producers to provide cost-effective, patient-adherence packaging.

The holographic industry is working hard to destroy the myth that sophisticated holograms cannot be counterfeited; anything can be counterfeited. The question is how well, and this is where the real value of holograms can be appreciated. The evolving anti-counterfeiting role of holograms lies in their ability to combine authentication with detection--and this is why enlightened pharmaceuticals companies and enforcement agencies continue to make them an integral part of their anti-counterfeiting strategies.

When packaging operations for Abilify, a drug to treat schizophrenia, and Coumadin, a blood thinner, were transferred to a different plant, Bristol-Myers Squibb decided to install a new bottle containment filling line. The goal was to improve fill accuracy and protect workers from the products’ dust. New Brunswick, NJ-based Bristol-Myers Squibb researched different fillers on the market and chose the Model 815 15-wheel bottle filler from Aylward Enterprises. This story describes Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Mt. Vernon, IN, facility's employment of a restricted access barrier system to protect workers from high-potency drugs.

Brand managers of healthcare products are beginning to use words like “efficacy” when discussing packaging options for their products—a sign that they view packaging as more than a carrier of the product. In the muscle pain-relief aisle, packaging reflects this elevated status for Mentholatum Co. Inc.’s WellPatch brand of treatment patches. Competition in the pain-relief category is increasing, and it created the need for a package redesign for WellPatch.

Pharmaceutical company packaging OEE's (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) are reported to be among the lowest in the industry. Experience teaches that those feeling the greatest amount of pain are the ones most likely to successfully drive change. Perhaps that is why three giant pharmaceutical companies reported on their efforts in this area at ARC's Forum on Winning Strategies and Best Practices for Global Manufacturers.

Watch for pharmaceutical manufacturers to employ robotics more frequently to boost efficiencies throughout their processing and packaging operations. “We may be ‘OnTheEdge’ of a major growth spurt for robotics on North American packaging lines,” notes Keith Campbell, consultant and OnTheEdgeBlog.com blogger. “Mechatronics and robotics are two ‘disruptive technologies’ that have the potential to transform the development of packaging equipment,” adds Ben Miyares, vice president of industry relations for the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.

Packaged wet wipes give hospital personnel and patients a weapon to fight the spread of bacteria. Sustainable packaging of these wipes could be next. ...The healthcare community is understandably concerned with the spread of diseases such as MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), or staph, and C. Diff (Clostridium Difficile), a diarrheal disease. One way to combat such diseases, either in a medical facility or at home, is through hygiene, which may include the use of specialized wet wipes, contract-manufactured and packaged by Fredonia, WI-based Guy & O’Neill, Inc. for a wide range of customers and applications.

Packaging a blockbuster prescription drug such as AstraZeneca’s Nexium blister- and wallet-packs (shown in photo) demands efficiency. At AstraZeneca’s plant in Södertälje, Sweden, nine robotic cells, featuring a mix of 16 robots from ABB Robotics and other suppliers, is providing that efficiency during case packing and palletizing on multiple packaging lines.

Since incorporating in 1993, North Brunswick, NJ-based Artegraft Inc. has used glass tubes to ship its U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved Class III natural collagen vascular grafts to hospitals, clinics, or hospital distributors. But occasional breakage during distribution and the desire to trim costs led the company to make a change this year to Eastman Chemical’s Eastar Copolyester MB002 resin. Eastman worked with O.Berk Co. to make the conversion. As a result of its transition to the tube, which incorporates a flat side, Artegraft is preventing breakage and saving money.

Attending the yearly HealthPack conference is an important educational opportunity for the medical device community, agree John Spitzley (shown in photo) and Curt Larsen, the event’s co-chairmen who developed the agenda for the March 4 – 6 event at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. “At HealthPack 2008, the keynote speaker will be Mary Jo Steiert, president of AORN, the Assn. of periOperative Registered Nurses,” says Larsen.

In addition to its shrink-sleeved canister format launched in early 2007 and sold at Costco, San Francisco, CA-based Bevology also developed a tube format for its effervescent Zenergize supplements. Introduced in September 2007 and sold in cartons, the products retail in seven varieties at Whole Foods, Walgreens, and Vitamin Shoppe stores nationally and in Los Angeles-area Longs and Ralphs stores. Each is priced at $6.99 for one variety of 10 all-natural servings.

In March 2007, to repackage its well-established “Skinlogics Lip Apeel” lip line peel/lip balm product, Carrollton TX-based BeautiControl, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Tupperware Brands, opted for injection-molded styrene acrylonitrile/polypropylene jars with stacked-component construction, custom-manufactured by TricorBraun .

Pharmaceutical firms seek packaging line improvements to cut costs, biologics present packaging challenges, and medical device growth is driven by aging baby boomers. These treatment advances bode well for the healthcare/life sciences packaging community. Packaging materials need to offer protection from point of manufacture to the “last mile” where healthcare products reach a patient. Packaging materials must provide barriers for moisture, oxygen, light and heat, and they may include overt and/or covert security measures to combat counterfeiting and diversion. Equipment will need to package products more efficiently, be validatable and versatile.

In this Q&A, Mel O’Leary, Jr., president and CEO of Meredith-Springfield Associates, describes how copolyester resin and supplier cooperation helped make the Artegraft tube. Meredith-Springfield is a plastic molder of technical hollow containers and custom bottles. It uses Eastman Chemical’s Eastar Copolyester MB002 resin to extrusion/blow-mold the Artegraft tubes.

Health Resources LLC of Hueytown, AL, was established in 1995 as a manufacturer of natural health supplements available by mail order. Today, the company offers more than 400 different SKUs, with products that promote a range of health solutions, including joint relief, heart health, reduced inflammation, and better digestion, among many others. In March, the company began running six AirPouch™ Express 3 air-pouch void-fill systems from Automated Packaging Systems to protect its bottles of product during shipment. The switch to air-pouch void-fill systems from loose-fill peanuts increases productivity, lessens mess, and reduces costs.

Nowhere in packaging are flexibility and fast changeover more necessary than in the contract-packaging arena, where multiple customers and their many SKUs are a fact of life. That’s why ease of changeover was a key machine characteristic sought by Brecon Pharmaceuticals recently when it came time to install a new line for blister packing and cartoning of tablets. This fast-growing contract packager, acquired last year by Amerisource Bergen, is located in the UK near the town of Brecon, Wales. Both thermoforming and cold-forming of foil are routinely done on this new and highly versatile blister-pack line.

Wyeth’s Charlie Portwood and Teva Global Generic Resource’s Uri Boneh will serve among the keynote speakers at The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering’s (ISPE) annual meeting Nov. 4 – 7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The event will feature more than 40 sessions, with topics including packaging, product quality lifecycle implementation, pandemic flu preparedness, personalized medicine, nanotechnology, disposables, and project management.

By using high-density polyethylene “bladder” bottles redesigned with a flattened base and “feet” that allow them to stand up on the conveyor line, a producer of a topical livestock insect repellant treatment was able to increase filling line efficiency and eliminate the need for pucks to hold the bottles on the filling line. The new 1- and 2.5-L bottles, from Airopak, a subsidiary of Novapak, replace rounded bottles that could not stand upright, so they had to be placed vertically into pucks for filling.

If ex-lifeguard Christine Doolittle has her way, patients who are unconscious or not breathing may one day be rescued thanks in part to an easy-to-access prefilled syringe pack she developed as a prototype last year while earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, GA. The package is not being sold commercially. The prototype was developed as part of a Design Initiative between SCAD and Eastman.

Providing quality healthcare while holding the line on costs continues to be a priority throughout much of the life sciences industry. Watching expenses is a critical task at Group Health as well, where the company’s Seattle facility handles mail-order prescriptions and serves as a central fill location for its 26 pharmacies located in both Washington and Idaho. Since adding a Maverick Enterprises UPM B/T (Universal Packaging Machine with Bottle and Tote infeed), Group Health has reduced its labor needs, improved efficiency within its confined 7,000 sq’ area, and readied itself to handle growing sales volume. In turn, those benefits help to hold down Group Health member costs.

A polypropylene container that includes a no dip-tube dispensing pump provides waste-free dispensing and fits within a reusable outer SAN container, helping Malibu Wellness, Inc. market its EC Mode skin-care products to salons, spas, and dermatologists. Malibu continues to take pride in staying in front of the curve when it comes to healthy skin care. So it's no surprise that the company is pioneering a reusable pack in the U.S. cosmeceutical market just when sustainable packaging has become so prominent.

How do you effectively communicate a new product, service, or packaging application for publication? It’s a question we receive with some frequency here at Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World magazines. Click on this story's headline to read some suggestions. One additional note: Healthcare Packaging will resume its four-times-per-month electronic newsletter beginning Friday, Aug. 3.

Much like drivers appreciate the performance, handling, and flexibility of the finest sports cars,
Italian contract manufacturer/packager Fine Foods N.T.M. (New Technology Manufacturing) S.p.A opts for similar characteristics in the packaging machinery it specifies. As manufacturers speed their products to market, it increases the deadline pressures on companies such as Fine Foods. In turn, Fine Foods relies on packaging machinery for the flexibility and output it needs to meet the demands of its manufacturer-customers.

The results of Cardinal Health’s RFID pilot were presented at the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Integrity conference, which was held in May and was sponsored by The Institute for International Research . Cardinal’s Pharmaceutical Technologies and Services (PTS) operations were recently divested and acquired by The Blackstone Group. This information was shared by Renard Jackson, formerly VP/GM Global Packaging Services of Cardinal Health, Dublin, OH, and now with PTS.

At a biomedical facility in Ireland, machine automation is coming into play in a validated environment that involves 21 CFR Part 11 electronic signatures, integrated robots and vision systems. The application is a real-world example of good automation standards providing real-world benefits. That’s according to Dr. Ken Ryan, director of the Center for Automation in Motion Control at Alexandria Technical College in Alexandria, MN. Ryan was recently interviewed by Ontheedgeblog.com blogger Keith Campbell. Also interviewed by Campbell was Shane Loughlin, president of SL Controls. Ryan and Loughlin were in Ireland at the time of the interview, investigating the healthcare packaging-related application that leverages automation standards to integrate best-of-breed equipment. The information in this article is excerpted from this recent interview. Listen to the complete podcast.

Michael Becker, director of engineering, Pfizer GmbH, reported on a four-year project, “FAST,” (Fully Automated Supply and Transport), recently completed at the firm’s Freiburg, Germany plant. The plant produces tablets and capsules of Lipitor, Valoron and Neurotin for 80 different countries in a wide variety of package configurations. The highly automated, computer integrated plan helped the plant achieve OEE comparable with other industries, depending on the equipment measured.

AstraZeneca recently piloted a new data collection system from Zarpac on a packaging line at its Westborough, MA, facility to collect data to identify ways to improve uptime. The results of the study were reported in a presentation March 29 at the Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum by Jeff Rosen, senior industrial engineer, Aseptic Manufacturing and Packaging for Wilmington, DE-based AstraZeneca.

A New York federal court’s invalidation of some aspects of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration’s drug pedigree requirement has not dampened the push being made by many pharmaceutical manufacturers to quickly get a handle on the complexities of item-level RFID tagging. Both manufacturers and wholesalers are motivated as much by California’s January, 2009, ePedigree requirement as the FDA Pedigree dictate, which would have required many smaller wholesalers without formal, manufacturer contracts to get detailed product information from manufacturers and pass it down the supply chain, step-by-step.

Several anti-counterfeiting initiatives are underway in the pharmaceutical sector, where it isn’t just brand protection that’s at stake but rather the very lives of people who take packaged drugs assuming the contents are genuine.

Hosted by Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World magazines, the first Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum featured speakers from Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Healthcare Users Group. More than 175 people packed The Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia for the March 29 event. The Forum’s exhibiting sponsors included Alcoa, Design Group, Bilcare, Rexroth Bosch Group, Intellitech, Parsec, Pharmintech, Uhlmann, United Silicone, and ZPI.

The Flexible Packaging Association awarded a Special Citation for Social Responsibility for a multilayer foil-laminated pouch that allows HIV-positive mothers in Kenya, Africa to give their newborn babies a dose of Nevirapine oral suspension within 24 hours of birth, when the fast-acting drug is most effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1. The award was announced February 28 during the FPA’s 2007 Achievement Awards at the association’s annual meeting in Aventura, FL.

DESIGN SERVICE

John White, engineering project manager at Smith & Nephew Orthopedics, cites globalization, and a ‘one-piece flow,’ lean manufacturing process as critical future issues.

First in a series of reports from the RFID Healthcare Industry Adoption Summit in Arlington, VA.

An automated pharmacy packaging system increases patient safety.

One new package that addresses the issue of hard-to-open pharmaceuticals is McNeil-PPC, Inc.’s Tylenol Arthritis Pain caplet bottle. Each bottle contains 100 caplets of 650 mg of acetaminophen. The bottle's wraparound label is printed with graphics saying, “NEW! E-Z OPEN CAP.” “Easy to open” is also molded into the deep-blue cap, which sports ridges that make it easy to grip and twist off.

“You wanted it easy to open. We made it the easiest,” says a print ad for the product. Smaller ad type below reads, “Introducing the easiest-to-open arthritis cap you can buy, Tylenol Arthritis Pain. If you’re not satisfied that it’s easier to open than Advil or Aleve, we’ll give you your money back.”

Package: Duoject’s Inter-Vial is a packaging system that contains, mixes, and injects medicine in a single unit. This medical device-drug package hybrid allows a health professional to reconstitute a lyophilized (freeze-dried) drug by mixing it with a liquid diluent. The drug is then injected, using the same device. The Inter-Vial consists of several intricately molded plastic pieces that have to be snapped or screwed together.