Hermetically sealed packaging for pharmaceuticals

A specialty pharmaceutical company making healthcare and dermatological products has adopted the Sigpack Systems state of the art packaging machinery to meet rising production demands

Warner-Chilcott was established in 1968 as a sales and marketing organisation focused on branded pharmaceutical products in the UK and Republic of Ireland: since then the company has continued to expand, acquiring a number of US birth control brands.

The company currently produces a range of birth control pills at a facility on the eastern side of the island of Puerto Rico, where the packaging operation is complex.

Blisters are filled with birth control pills, a number of which are wrapped together with a patient information insert, a wallet holder and a desiccant: some are even sealed hermetically.

As Warner-Chilcott has increased the required proportion of hermetically sealed blisters, the existing wrappers could not cope with increasing production demand.

As a result, the company asked Sigpack Systems to provide a reliable, high performance system that would meet stringent pharmaceutical quality assurance needs.

Sigpack Systems consequently supplied Warner-Chilcott with its HBL machine (the highest-speed hermetic wrapping system on the market) as part of a complete system.

Sigpack Systems has increased the efficiency of operation and maintenance training through ergonomic touch screens and built in logic to enable individual operators to control the entire system.

Warner-Chilcott has been provided with a system which manages the four product components (blister, wallet holder, patient insert and desiccant) seamlessly, and can handle a consistent feed rate of 200 units per minute.

All components entering the wrapper chain are verified.

The system includes a sophisticated feeding control which verifies the presence of each component with an integrated latch out function to reduce waste.

Only a product properly wrapped with all the components is able to travel on to the downstream cartoner.

Since the product carrier chain and cross-crimper head are operated by independent servo drives, Sigpack Systems was able to incorporate a "no gap / no-seal" feature, thus providing the benefit that the heads will not come down on the components should they be positioned incorrectly within the film tube.

Any invalid product is rejected and the rejection is verified in accordance with pharmaceutical industry requirements - all without any break in the system operation.

Within the pharmaceutical industry all batch codes and expiration dates need to be verified.

To ensure this, Sigpack Systems uses a vision system to verify the print on the individually wrapped blisters and to keep a log of this process for traceability purposes.

Any incorrect data is detected and triggers the rejection of the product, saving time and costs by reducing machinery down time and waste.

Sigpack Systems plays a key role in supporting its customers and thereby helps keep the supply chain reliable and secure.

Jose Carrasquillo believes that "the reason for any client, like me, to choose a company like Sigpack Systems is not just for the main equipment, in this case the wrapper, but to integrate all the ancillary equipment into a single system and take responsibility for the performance of the whole line".

Back to top