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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.
Synchronized lines, rather than individual pieces of equipment, will be a focus of pharmaceutical manufacturers, predicts PMMI’s Ben Miyares. In this exclusive Q&A interview with Healthcare Packaging, Miyares addresses multiple healthcare packaging-related issues, including mechatronics and robotics, which, he says, "have the potential to transform the development of packaging equipment." He also looks at sustainability, packaging equipment purchase considerations, E-machinery, and counterfeiting topics.
Certain types of cancer are becoming "chronic" diseases and call for changes in packaging, according to Dr. Joseph Gligorov, an oncologist in France. He made these remarks February 6, 2008, at Pharmapack in Paris, France, during a session titled, "Cancer Treatment: The Emerging Role of Packaging." While cancer rates are growing around the world, from 10 million cases diagnosed in 2000 to 15 million projected in 2020, many of these are due to the aging population, people who may also suffer from a variety of other ailments. More than 650 drugs to fight cancer are currently in the pipeline.
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.
Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World, producers of the Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum, and Ipack-Ima Spa, organizers of Pharmintech, announce a cooperative agreement in which Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World will offer promotional support to Ipack-Ima Spa, increasing the visibility for their Italian trade event, Pharmintech, to the U.S. pharmaceutical market. Pharmintech, held every three years in Italy, will next take place May 12th -14th, 2010 in Bologna, Italy.
A new law that was widely described as strengthening Food and Drug Administration powers over approved drugs contains a spotlight on packaging that, among other things, will soon require unique numbering of individual packages of prescription drug products. In the FDA Amendments Act of 2007, little-noticed section 913 adds a new section to the law called "Pharmaceutical Security" that calls for federal government officials to "develop standards and validate effective technologies" to secure the drug supply chain against "counterfeit, diverted, subpotent, substandard, adulterated, misbranded, or expired drugs."
Packaging Hall of Fame inductee Edward J. Bauer, investigative reporter and award-winning author Katherine Eban, and Joint Equipment Transition Team (JETT) Chairman Jim John are among the speakers scheduled to make presentations at the upcoming Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum (PPF) 2008. Produced by Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World magazines, the event will be held on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at The Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia, the same venue that hosted the initial PPF March 29, 2007.
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.
The Freedonia Group forecasts that sales demand for high-visibility packaging in the pharmaceutical and medical markets will advance 7.9% annually to $1.9 billion by 2010. The organization refers to high-visibility packaging as packaging that allows consumers to see the product through the packaging. These include windowed boxes and bags, carded blister packs, skin packaging, and interlocking containers.
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.
Whippany, NJ-based healthcare contract packager TestPak unveils its child-resistant, senior-friendly line at an October open house. By the end of this year, says TestPak's Bill Eveleth, child-resistant blister packs produced on this new packaging line will be sold commercially in developmental quantities for prescription applications.
For years, the Healthcare Compliance Packaging Council and others have touted unit-dose packaging as a way to improve patient compliance, compared with traditional medicine bottles. In fact, Ben Miyares, vice president of industry relations with the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI), predicted the end of drug bottles.
The Food and Drug Administration made its widest-ranging drug-packaging dictate ever when it announced in October that the agency wanted manufacturers of antidepressants to put those products in unit-of-use packaging. Never before had the agency mandated a type of packaging for an entire class of drugs.
