7 Challenges Facing By Pharmaceutical Packaging Industry
The pharmaceutical packaging industry, owing to the sensitive nature of products, also faces a lot of challenges. Poor packaging can cause chemical alterations in the product damaging their curative ability and ineffective performance. Thus, any pharmaceutical industry is subjected to stringent packaging standards and often face challenges like:
1. Safe Transportation of non-solid medication
While pills and tablets are comparatively simpler to handle due to their ability to be stacked, liquid medication and injections, especially with glass packing are much more difficult to handle because of their fragile nature. To try and counter this problem, the pharmaceutical packaging industry in India is integrating innovative solutions like foam packaging and rotomolded cases to glass cases from breaking down.
2. Retaining medicinal quality of the products
One of the major challenges that the industry faces is due to sustained exposure to heat as well as humidity, the product may lose its healing capabilities, rendering the product completely useless. The pharmaceutical packaging materials must be chosen very carefully and should not let external factors affect the product.
3. Accurate Dosage and Drug Information
Any medicine must be consumed according to the prescribed dose. To avoid any confusion, it is imperative that the necessary dosage information, as well as the drug that it is composed with, must be present on the packaging of the product itself. Further, other valuable information such as expiry date and the serial or batch number to simplify tracking should also find a place on the packaging. It is also necessary to point out parameters like a minimum age for safe consumption of the drug.
4. Newly developed drugs conflicting with packaging material
As the pharmaceutical industry witnesses development of innovative and new-age drugs, many of them are often in conflict with the materials being used to packaging them. For instance, there are certain drug combinations that lead to flaking of glass packaging. Another such instance is when silicone oil being used in prefilled syringes to lubricate the plunger in. The lubricant often disturbs the composition of the protein complexes. This has led to the need for newer pharmaceutical packaging materials.
5. Averting Forged Products
With so many products from a variety of brands flooding the market, it is not surprising that forged drugs are also on the rise. The danger of these drugs cannot be underestimated because of the potential side effects they might have on the customer. In order to prevent this major problem, pharmaceutical packaging is an important aspect. Research and innovation in this domain has led to increase in scannable codes, hologram stickers, UV prints that ensure that official products stand apart from the fake ones.
6. Adhering to Regulatory Standards
A pharmaceutical company may be selling the same product under different names in different markets. As the companies produce those drugs on a single Process line, the task of printing, labeling, and packaging becomes complicated.
7. Awareness and Education of Medical Practitioners and Consumers
Consumer needs to be aware about what is inside the packaging, how to use the product and how to dispense it. If a person takes a wrong medicine or improper dosage, it can have a severe effect on their health, sometimes fatal. Thus, proper direction of use needs to be printed on the packaging in order to ensure safe and secure use of the medicine.
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