Announced in late May, the alliance will provide pharmaceutical packaging with child-resistant, senior-friendly, and other features aimed to make it easier for patients to understand how to take a prescription. To produce such packaging, Bosch Packaging Technology is developing an automated cartoning machine. Stora Enso provides package design and supplies specially developed paperboard.
Marietta, GA-based Solvay Pharmaceuticals “evaluated the concept late last year and early this year,” says Thomas Rebne, a senior packaging engineer for Solvay, an international organization that’s headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. “We were evaluating [packaging materials] for use as a child-resistant package for commercial use,” he says, “for an irritable bowel syndrome product,” that he anticipates will be introduced sometime next year.
The package concept, Rebne says, included an unprinted 16- or 18-pt SBS folding carton to hold a blister package containing the product. “The combination package was attractive,” says Rebne. “It met the required child-resistance guidelines, and from a medication compliance perspective, it helped in instructing patients how to take their medication as prescribed.”
Rebne says Solvay “could use [the package concept] down the road. It has potential and makes a nice package that meets child-resistant protocols.”
According to Bosch Packaging Technology’s Helmut Deichert, “our target is to have the first generation of packaging machines available within the first half of 2005 and complete packaging lines with blister machine, cartoning machine, and final packaging shortly afterward.”
See the story that goes with this sidebar: Packaging delivers for pharmaceutical and medical firms
