Originally Published PMPN February 2005
Blisters
Pushing Costs out of
Blister Packaging
Companies are
increasingly investing in more-efficient production processes and better materials.
Christina Elston
Contributing Writer
 |
Better Barriers
Pharmaceutical blister packaging with good barrier properties can lengthen the shelf life of medications and save companies the expense of removing expired products from the market, according to William Nelson, director of marketing and business development for Alcoa Flexible Packaging (Richmond, VA). Nelson says that Alcoa is developing heat-sealing lacquer coatings, cohesive films, and peelable films that offer the barrier properties needed to lengthen shelf life, “which is dollars-and-cents savings to our customers. Millions of dollars.”
Companies are also looking to take costs out of the materials themselves, leading them to offer less-expensive barrier materials. “Cyclolefin copolymer (COC) seems to be making huge inroads,” says Howard Thau, director of marketing, Sonic Packaging Industries Inc. (Westwood, NJ). “Companies are really pushing to find films with the barrier properties, but without some of that additional cost.”
Alcan Packaging (Shelbyville, KY), Ticona (Summit, NJ), and Cardinal Health (Philadelphia, PA) also offer COC as an alternative to both foil and Aclar. “New multilayer laminate structures containing a layer of COC sandwiched between layers of polypropylene are making headway where exceptional clarity, rigidity and high barrier properties are required,” says Cardinal’s vice president of business development for packaging services, Michael Bergey.
In many cases, actual barrier requirements are not known at the time a product is placed on stability, according to John Blum, manager of global technical support for the healthcare division of Honeywell (Morristown, NJ). But the ability to protect products under accelerated stability conditions to reduce time to market is critical. “Honeywell’s converter partners are able to combine Honeywell Aclar UltRx 4000, a clear, ultra-high-barrier film, with combinations of forming webs and barrier films to provide blisters with high moisture (or moisture and oxygen) barrier,” Blum says. “When real-time stability data are available, it is possible to reduce the barrier of the package without changing the chemistry of the contact layer or components of the package by using Honeywell Aclar film.”
Child-Resistant and Senior-Friendly
While the materials must meet exceptional barrier and budget requirements, blister packaging itself is being subjected to a growing list of demands—among those the ongoing demand for packaging that is child-resistant, yet senior-friendly.
“The challenge is making that primary package easy for a senior to open, but designing it so a child can’t get into it,” says Thau. Sonic recently partnered with a folding-carton supplier to create a lightweight blister card that is completely child resistant and senior-friendly, yet is less costly to manufacture.
Cardinal Health offers Easy Tear and Slide Pack packaging for child-resistant and senior-friendly applications, according to Bergey. “Additional developmental work is also being performed on a second generation blister package design similar in function to Easy Tear, but more cost effective for the consumer,” he says. “We expect this new package will be available after CR studies are completed sometime in the first quarter of 2005.”
Packaging is even being developed to help pharmacists, doctors, and clinicians ensure that patients are taking their medication properly. The Medic ECM (Electronic Compliance Monitoring) system from Information Mediary Corp. (Ottawa, Ontario) uses proprietary conductive ink to create a record of when a patient pushes a solid-dose medication through the blister pack.
The system, which adds neither bulk nor weight, includes a circuit board that stores records of the exact time and date each dose was removed, making the information retrievable through a radio-frequency identification (RFID) transfer. “We wanted to make sure any innovation we developed would go with current industry standards,” says product manager James Nielson.
The ECM system also helps check if patients are shortening their dose intervals, a particularly crucial development when opiates and other strong prescriptions are involved. “Overdoing it on doses is one of the ways patients become addicted to Oxycontin and other strong painkillers,” says Allan Wilson, MD, PhD, and president of Information Mediary. “In addition, noncompliance in general is a huge problem in clinical settings. This sytem provides one way of solving that problem and ultimately helping patients take the correct dose.” Wilson says the company is specifically targeting pharmaceutical companies that manufacture opiates with the ECM system. “It works very well with blisters in particular,” he says. “A tag goes right in the blister pack and makes the monitoring process quite simple. We think it’s an excellent part of a comprehensive strategy to combat noncompliance.”
New Applications
 |
| Honeywell’s Aclar UltRx 4000 is a high-barrier film that can be combined with forming webs and other barrier films to provide blisters with high moisture barrier. |
Thanks to its many developing capabilities, blister packaging is also being employed for a variety of new applications. “Many customers today have been looking to dispense more than just a solid dose in a blister format,” says Thau. To that end, Sonic Packaging has been creating blisters for unit-of-use liquids, creams, and powders. For such applications, selection of the proper materials and sealant are essential, according to Thau.
One customer looking to package a hormone treatment cream required a seal strong enough to keep the cream from migrating through, yet peelable for dispensing purposes, according to Thau. “We’re able to contain the product with a three-year shelf life, at the same time allowing the patient to peel the seal and expose the whole product well,” Thau says. Products can be packaged with sterile applicators for each dose to improve convenience and aid in patient compliance, adds Thau.
Blister packaging is also being used for inhalable drug-delivery systems, dental gum, diagnostic devices such as blood glucose monitors, and novel cancer pain treatments requiring barrier protection and tamper evidence, according to Alcan’s marketing manager, Scott Denley. And Cardinal is working on new blister package concepts for unit-dose oral film strips. “We also continue to be innovative in the area of trays and kits for biologics,” says Bergey.
Delivery systems are also changing, according to Blum. “Honeywell has worked with Hueck Foils (Wall, NJ) to provide a system that allows the use of Honeywell Aclar as the contact layer on the interior of the blister. This system was developed to provide higher barrier, as well as additional chemical resistance, for liquid-fill applications,” he says.
Efficiencies in
Manufacturing
Whatever the use of a blister pack, and whatever materials it contains, sometimes the greatest cost savings can be found in manufacturing the materials and packaging more efficiently. “We’re consolidating wherever and however we can, wherever it makes sense,” says Alcoa’s Nelson. The company, he says, is working to be more efficient, adding equipment, and using new manufacturing methodologies to help lower costs for their customers. “That’s the ideal way to do it,” he continues. “That’s the easiest way to support our customers.”
Sometimes the key is to run a tighter, quicker ship, at least in terms of production. “Reducing the bagginess in foil material that can lead to heightened waste and longer production runs, and adhesive materials that require shorter curing times both allow blister packagers to offer material savings,” says Denley.
Often, materials and equipment must be factored together to achieve the greatest savings. “In many instances, Cardinal Health is working directly with both materials suppliers and blister-packaging equipment manufacturers to improve efficiencies and drive costs down at the project level,” says Bergey.
Package Inspection
One clear way for a manufacturing line to maintain efficiency is to detect and correct errors, such as leaving one blister in a pack unfilled, immediately. Both machine vision equipment and photoelectric sensors can help with this, but both have limitations. Machine vision is expensive to deploy and complex to run, while photoelectric sensors require that one sensor be deployed for each blister in a pack.
For lines too complex for photoelectric sensors, yet too simple to justify the investment in machine vision, there is now an alternative, according to John Keating of Cognex Corp. (Natick, MA). The company’s new product, simply called Checker, is meant to fill the gap. “It’s really a sensor that’s meant to do presence-absence applications,” Keating says.
The unit is approximately the size of a small digital camera, and completely self-contained. It is meant to work like a sensor, and keeps all of its statistics on board. But unlike machine vision applications, the unit doesn’t require analysis of the numbers to determine whether there is something wrong. The unit simply gives a pass or fail to each card it inspects. “There’s no decision making on the user’s part,” Keating says. “We do the logic for you.”
In addition, one Checker can look at an entire blister pack. The unit only requires a USB connection at setup time, the operations manual is a mere six pages long, and no training classes are required. The average user can have the system working in under an hour, Keating says. “We saw a huge gap between vision sensors and photoelectric sensors,” he explains. “Checker is designed so anybody who works on a factory floor could solve a vision problem by themselves.”
Global Standards and Manufacturing
 |
| Honeywell’s Aclar film makes it possible to reduce the barrier of a package without changing its chemistry, contact layer, or components. |
Throughout the industry, the factory floor is increasingly moving offshore so companies can take advantage of lower labor costs, according to Nelson. Pharmaceutical companies are devoting increasing efforts to marketing their products offshore as well. And learning to do business globally means creating packaging that meets global standards and requirements.
Companies used to be able to meet U.S. standards, and consider that good enough for the rest of the markets they might serve. “We’re in a global marketplace today, and that’s no longer good enough,” Nelson says.
Kevin Carter of Uhlmann (Towaco, NJ) sees a growing trend toward global distribution fueling a need for “more-flexible equipment to do changeovers more rapidly.” The company’s Blister Express Center has a maximum speed of 100 packages per minute, but the product’s changeover time more than makes up for that. “The changeover is under 20 minutes for the entire line,” Carter says.
Batch sizes in general are getting smaller, Carter explains, and the current global atmosphere means that companies have to change packaging components even more than they change products. “The worldwide distribution has had an effect on that,” says Carter. Uhlmann has had such demand that it is developing systems to ensure that correct tooling is being put in place during changeovers, so that the process is even more efficient. “A blister line is much like an airplane. It doesn’t make any money sitting still at the gate,” he says.
Along with regulatory standards, customer demands include increasing environmental sensitivity for the Japanese and European markets, as well as growing demand for high moisture barrier in Asia and South America, according to Dirk Heukelbach, marketing manager at Ticona (Summit, NJ). “Topas COC offers a unique performance package allowing converters to position COC films according to customer needs,” he says.
So to continue to meet the demands of the market, blister packagers will have to do even more, for even less, in an ever-greater portion of the globe. As they meet these challenges, no doubt, pharmaceutical companies will continue to find even more applications for blister packaging.
Copyright ©2005 Pharmaceutical & Medical Packaging News
