With the deadlines for compliance with two major pieces of legislation fundamentally affecting the pharmaceutical sector, a leading industry analyst has made a strong plea for the industry to adopt more Active and Intelligent Packaging (A&IP) solutions ‘to deal with the traceability requirements of today and the authentication and compliance issues just around the corner’.
Commenting in advance of the AIPIA Congress on A&IP In Action, Dick de Koning, a leading independent packaging analyst, said “Both the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) in the USA and the EU’s Falsified Medicines Directive become fully operational in 2017 and 2016 respectively. I would like to see a more proactive approach from the drug companies, looking beyond traceability issues, to fully embrace A&IP technologies which can address all the problems they face in one go. Currently their piecemeal approach will end up costing more money than if they bite the bullet now.”
Several topics at the AIPIA will cover solutions for the pharmaceutical sector and look at other aspects of A&IP technologies as well as offering a more holistic approach to the industry’s ‘headaches’.
For the last 8 years Confrérie Clinique has been working on its MEDICCINE™ technology, an integrated mHealth system to measure therapy adherence of patients. This has been based upon various packaging media such as blisters, bottles and syringes. It is smart packaging, that is able to monitor storage conditions and intake of solid & liquid medication by using a specially designed microchip. Co-founder Jos Geboers will explain how it works.
The integration of printed electronics into packaging opens up a wide range of market opportunities to create added value for the packaging industry. Sandy Gunn from the Centre for Process Innovation will explain how printed electronics can be incorporated within packaging to improve patient outcomes and compliance by providing information and validation around anti-counterfeiting, product tampering and also whether the contents are fit for consumption. CPI is working alongside commercial partners in order to develop intelligent packaging for a number of market sectors including the pharmaceutical industry.
According to Jeremy Laurens, co-founder of Blulog, five out of 10 of the most sold pharmaceutical products need to be kept between 2 and 8°C from the producer to the dispensary. Currently isothermal packaging and temperature dataloggers are sold separately. What if they could be combined ? The use of NFC technology makes it possible to have very thin temperature dataloggers directly integrated into the isothermal packaging, these can not only track temperature, but also logistical information, from tracking numbers to GPS coordinates, accessed through a smartphone.
“Here are just a few examples of how multiple solutions can be combined into one packaging device to aid pharmaceutical authenticity, security and compliance,” added de Koning. “I hope plenty of the sector’s packaging experts see this Congress as a vital opportunity to gather information and get into the A&IP network,” he said.
