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Taking a cost-effective approach to drug and biologic shipments

Knowing your product’s stability requirements, distribution temperature/humidity factors, and your risk tolerances are critical in successful shipments of temperature-sensitive products.

Pw 3400 Pfizer

Both scenarios involve quite different risk tolerances, according to Geoffrey Glauser, director, Global Packaging Technology at Pfizer. Glauser made a presentation entitled, “Temperature-controlled packaging for biopharmaceuticals, the cold chain, and the regulatory environment,” at the May 27 Healthcare Packaging Conference & Workshops event in Princeton, NJ.

Maintaining product stability throughout the distribution chain is critical, as are economic considerations. Understanding your distribution environment, he says, is imperative to satisfactorily shipping temperature-sensitive products.

“If you have some flexibility in your stability requirements, you can incorporate them into your package design,” says Glauser. For example, he says that if the product doesn’t require strict 2°C to 8°C temperatures, there’s an opportunity for cost savings in the distribution chain. “Shipping in that temperature range can double your costs compared to shipping at 2° to 13° C or 2° to 16° C,” he says. Finding a satisfactory balance between over- and under-engineering packaging is challenging, and it’s not uncommon for companies to over-engineer packages for sensitive, expensive pharmaceuticals and biologics.

“Package design and material choices can be made based on information you’ve acquired by developing a database of weather patterns experienced in the distribution of your products,” says Glauser. Often, he notes, packaging is designed to protect products left out for long time periods in extreme weather conditions. That can result in over-engineered, costly solutions.

“A package is often exposed to the outdoors for comparatively short periods of time,” he explains. “So if you were to design a package that needed to go to Saudi Arabia, you would not necessarily design it to sit on the tarmac there for 96 hours since it’s only going to be out for four to six hours.”

Qualification

Following Good Manufacturing Practices is a given, he says. A qualification methodology process involves determining whether to use an insulated container with refrigerated gels and frozen gels, or some other passive method of cooling—perhaps an active system with compressors and heating units, such as on a transport truck or an aircraft container that employs an active temperature control such as a portable heater or refrigerator in the aircraft.

In developing a product stability profile, you must test and document what your product can withstand up to x degrees for x amount of time, know what the heating and freezing points are, and what the degradation points of the product are.

Companies need to determine shipment quantities, and how packaged product will be loaded onto a truck or airplane to better understand airflow patterns from top to bottom and front to back in the tractor-trailer or belly of an aircraft. “If you block airflow you are not going to get consistency across the load,” says Glauser. Maintaining proper temperatures is challenging he says, noting that “Home refrigerators are not validatable because anybody can come and tweak the temperature control. When you talk about pharmaceutical validation and the strictness of 2° to 8° C temperature control, many hospitals, unfortunately, buy refrigerators that look and function similarly to the ones that you have in your home.”

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