PharmaMedDevice Industry Blog

Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum launches in Philly

A few weeks ago, the first ever Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum took place. It featured speakers from Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Healthcare Users Group. More than 175 people packed The Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia for the March 29 event. The Forum’s exhibiting sponsors included Alcoa, Design Group, Bilcare, Rexroth Bosch Group, Intellitech, Parsec, Pharmintech, Uhlmann, United Silicone, and ZPI. Package design experts Richard Gerstman and Herb Meyers even initiated  some spirited debates when they reviewed a variety of over-the-counter pharmaceutical packages. Hosted by Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World magazines, read more here. Subscribions are free! Sign up here receive the weekly  Healthcare Packaging e-mail newsletter and quarterly print publication.

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.

Tissue Engineering-Based Combination Products

By Jim Butschli, Editor-in-Chief, HEALTHCARE PACKAGING magazine (www.healthcare-packaging.com)

Combination products appear ready to deliver profound changes in the treatment of disease. In the near future, combination products could include cells (biologics) producing proteins (biotech drugs) growing on polymer scaffolds (medical devices). As the editor of HEALTHCARE PACKAGING, I’m more than a little puzzled at how these futuristic combination products will be packaged, sterilized, and transported, particularly if they’re produced on an individualized basis. This example of tissue engineering-based combination products “represents the quintessential example of a combination product...