When you are introducing a new medication to the market, you might be feeling a range of emotions ranging from overwhelming excitement to overwhelming anxiety. Years of hard work and research went in to getting to this point, and you have millions of details to work out to be successful. The thin film pharmaceutical packaging used in your medical packaging design might be the least of your worries. However, choosing the right thin film pharmaceutical packaging is essential for the safety and shelf life of the product, and reducing liability and costly recalls for you. Before choosing just any thin film pharmaceutical packaging, you should consider these factors:
Four Tips for Choosing the Right Thin Film Pharmaceutical Packaging Supplier
- Get the pharmaceutical packaging companies involved in the process as early as possible.
The Food and Drug Administration is more concerned with save pharma packaging than ever before. Factors such as whether or not the plastic blister packaging or medication bottle is safe from contamination after it has been sealed will be extensively tested. In fact, the entire packaging process will go under the microscope to ensure that only sterile techniques are used, from beginning to end. To ensure excellence and success with your drug packaging, get the packaging company involved in the process as early as possible.
A strong partnership between a drug manufacturer and its packaging company benefits both entities. Both the drug manufacturer and the packager need to understand the challenges and risks that each other deal with, and their processes, in order to create a cohesive transition from development to packaging. The earlier the packager is involved in the process, the greater excellence and efficiency that they will pull off together. - Make consistency one of your greatest priorities.
When a packaging company offers consistency from one lot to the next, it reduces the risk of drugs being compromised due to leachables. The drug manufacturer should make it a point to use the same packaging material throughout the entire process, from research and development to production and distribution. This way, any unforeseen interactions between the pharmaceutical and its packaging will arise early in the process, long before you have to deal with a costly recall, all due to a packaging issue. - Choose a packaging provider who can offer pharmaceutical serialisation.
When your product involves pharmaceutical serialisation, each lot has its own identification that can be tracked and traced. This ensures that every batch of your pharmaceutical is verified before it is released to the public. If there was any compromised with your product, it can be tracked down to the specific lot and the source will be identified and mitigated right away (whereas, without a good serialisation program on your packaging, any issue with your product could lead to a massive entity-wide recall that could ruin your pharmaceutical forever). Additionally, when your product is packaged with pharmaceutical serialisation, it offers you the ability to expedite some leachables testing requirements in the drug application process. This can take years off of the commercialization cycle process. - Stick with high-quality materials to avoid costly recalls.
Your upfront costs might be slightly higher when you use good quality materials. We understand that spending more money upfront before you’re profitable is difficult. However, opting for only good quality packaging provides long-term advantages that you’ll be glad for in the long run. Some of the benefits of using good quality packaging materials include:- High-quality packaging leads to fewer defects during the manufacturing and distribution process, which would cost you far more than the added expense of the high-quality packaging.
- Avoided flaws and failures in the development and production process that would led to discarded product.
- Avoiding the added time and expense of additional research and labor when defects arise in the production process, since defects are less likely to arise.
- Fewer resources have to be dedication to process improvement, when you get it right from the beginning.
- And of course, the most important factor, avoiding costly and potentially debilitating product recalls that resulted from packaging failures.
Developing a pharmaceutical is an incredible achievement. We hope that you experience all of the success in the world and more. An important part of that is choosing the right packager; use this guide to make sure you do.