PHARMACEUTICAL PACKAGING HANDBOOK PHARMACEUTICAL PACKAGING HANDBOOK EDWARD J.BAUER Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Informa Healthcare USA, Inc. 52 Vanderbilt Avenue New York, NY 10017 # 2009 by Informa Healthcare USA, Inc. Informa Healthcare is an Informa business No claim to original U.S. Government works Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 International Standard Book Number-10: 1-5871-6151-6 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-5871-6151-3 (Hardcover) This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reprinted material is quoted with permission, and sources are indicated. A wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequence of their use. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bauer, Edward J., 1947- Pharmaceutical packaging handbook / Edward J. Bauer p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-5871-6151-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-5871-6151-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Drugs— Packaging–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Drug Packaging. QV 825 B344p 2008] RS159.5.B38 2009 6150.10688–dc22 2008051340 For Corporate Sales and Reprint Permissions call 212-520-2700 or write to: Sales Department, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, 16th floor, New York, NY 10017. Visit the Informa Web site at www.informa.com and the Informa Healthcare Web site at www.informahealthcare.com Preface Pharmaceutical packaging is a subject that rarely comes to mind when thinking of drugs, medical devices, or other divisions of the health care industry. Packaging done well provides protection, sterility, and safety. Health care professionals and patients hardly give it a thought. Packaging done poorly usually means a package that is hard to open. These perceptions and the almost invisible presence of packaging science in most peoples’ understanding of pharmaceuticals was the idea behind this book. Pharmaceutical products, or more appropriately biopharmaceutical prod- ucts, and health care in developed countries are wonders of the modern world. Pharmaceutical products and health care in developing countries and remote parts of the world seems like magic. Diseases that were once fatal and chronic conditions that destroyed lives have slowly been conquered by modern medicine. Views of the body, unimaginable for most of the last century with X rays, are now possible with new imaging techniques that let us see the body in exquisite detail. We have come to expect a steady stream of new technology that cures or vaccinates us from ailments and potentially deadly viruses. We take for granted that new and better diagnostic techniques will improve our ability to understand and fix our bodies. We have grown accustomed to transplants, angioplasty, stents to open clogged arteries, joint replacements, and other devices that fix and repair our parts of our body. The packaging and protection of these modern wonders of pharmaceutical and medical technology are almost as important as the drugs themselves. Without packaging, drugs and medical devices would never leave a factory or a laboratory. Packaging provides containment, protection, and safe delivery of products everywhere health care is needed and makes possible the availability and use of drugs, vaccines and medical devices in hostile environments. It iii iv Preface ensures safe delivery of drugs and devices to accident scenes as easily as it does to hospitals. Labels and information contained in packaging communicates and explains to doctors, pharmacists, nurses, health care workers, and patients about how to use a product. It warns you of dangers and communicates how and when to take a drug, what is safe, what precautions to take, and what to avoid when undergoing treatment. This is an amazing set of packaging tasks that few, if any, notice. Packaging is an emerging science and engineering discipline that touches people everywhere. A combination of natural sciences, engineering, materials science, and other social disciplines contribute to the design, development, and delivery of products, not pharmaceuticals alone. It is a high-technology field that we count on everyday to deliver billions of safe, sterile, and easy-to-open packages that touch every part of our lives. This book was written as an introduction to pharmaceutical packaging. It has been kept simple and accessible to the average reader with some technical training in chemistry, physics, and engineering. It attempts to introduce you to the many things beyond packaging that are part of the drug, dosage, and regulatory environment. It highlights many of the problems a packaging engineer must face when developing a package for a new product. It uses short explanations of drug composition and interaction with the body to help explain how these issues answer many questions about packaging a drug or medical device. It introduces many issues that are part of the normal compromises and questions surrounding different drugs. It tries to highlight regulatory difficulties by explaining some of the concerns and safeguards various regulations introduce into the package, the product, and the process by which it is made. It provides a short introduction to package-manufacturing processes and the many materials used in pharmaceutical packaging. Hopefully, the book will help you understand the role packaging technol- ogy plays in pharmaceutical and medical device design and development. It tries to introduce you to several basic concepts of packaging. The book highlights concepts in chemistry, polymer science, packaging and other disciplines to help you understand the product, its composition, what the package must do to protect the product. It provides examples on how the product can change depending on its chemistry and the environment the package must withstand prior to delivery to the patient. It tries to provide you with a practical sense of how the package, the product, and the way it is manufactured all play an important role in producing a safe sterile product. The book attempts to highlight the whats, whys, and hows that go into pharmaceutical packaging, and attempts to do this while explaining the inter- actions between the drug or device and the package. It is an introduction to the many diverse skills and needs of pharmaceutical packaging. It highlights the diverse and complimentary skills employed by packaging professionals who are great scientific generalists, that is, people who can combine science, engineering, materials, manufacturing, consumer issues, and societal issues like Preface v environmentalism into packaging. All of these factors are part of the input needed to deliver a drug or medical device in a safe and responsible way. Packaging has become a new stand-alone scientific and engineering discipline within corporations. Regulation of drugs and medical devices by governments around the world is a big part of packaging. Many reading this book will be surprised to discover the FDA and other regulatory agencies around the world are as critical of the packaging and its performance as they are in examining the efficacy of the drug product. One liberty taken while writing this book is the use of the words drug and pharmaceutical as synonyms. Technically drug refers to the active pharma- ceutical ingredient in a product, and pharmaceutical refers to the finished product. This means that the pharmaceutical is the product being packaged, not the drug. Hopefully, this book will provide some basic insight into an exciting and challenging science that goes unnoticed by so many. Edward J. Bauer Contents Preface . iii 1. Introduction to the Pharmaceutical Industry: An Overview . 1 Introduction ......................................... 1 General Aspects of Drug Packaging .................... 1 Brief History . .................................... 3 General Business Overview of the Pharmaceutical Industry ....... 6 General Industry Challenges and Trends . ................ 9 The Evolution and Structure of the Pharmaceutical Business ..... 9 Therapeutic Areas of Concentration ................... 11 General Worldwide Pharmaceutical Trends ................. 12 Cost and Pricing Trends ........................... 13 Generic Products ................................ 13 OTC Products . ................................. 14 Definition of a Drug ................................. 14 The Differences Between Pharmaceutical and