Pharmacogenomics: Getting personal with packaging

By Jim Butschli, Editor, Healthcare Packaging

Looking forward, it’s a good bet that combination products will partner with personalized medicine (pharmacogenomics), to use drugs, biologics, and medical devices together to treat individual patients based on their specific genetic characteristics.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report, “Personalized Medicine: The Emerging Pharmacogenomics Revolution,” notes, “Pharmacogenomics… promises to usher in an era of individualized patient care or personalized medicine.” Yet PWC adds, “Despite its promise, pharmacogenomics faces significant technical and societal challenges.” And then you add packaging to the list of challenges. Many of today’s drugs are packaged on equipment and lines designed to efficiently produce large volumes at high speeds, so the idea of packaging drugs for individual patients could set that packaging strategy on its ear, right? Not necessarily.