On-the-go market

Unconventional partnerships

Gearing for the future

Kenya and beyond

Unconventional partnerships

Single-serve packaging to suit the needs of patients in low and middle income countries.

Science

Taking inspiration from candy packages

Many people in low-income regions of the world, who earn two dollars or less a day, struggle to access medicines. Current pharmaceutical packaging standards don’t take this into account. The Roll_U-Genesis* team plans to change that.

Text by K. E. D. Coan, photos by Adriano Biondo and Laurids Jensen

Assembly hall of the machine supplier.

Table of contents

On-the-go market

Unconventional partnerships

Gearing for the future

Kenya and beyond

Published on 26/07/2020

“In low-income countries many people earn less than two dollars a day and they’re paid daily – so purchasing a pack of diabetes or blood pressure medication for a month, as we’re used to here in Europe, is a real issue for them,” says Laurent Hérault, who heads Packaging Design & Devices at Novartis. “They have to pay for housing, food, utilities, and children’s education and at the end they have very little left on a day-to-day basis for medicine.”

Hérault, who has led packaging teams around the world for over two decades, wanted to change that, kick-starting the Roll_U project as part of the Novartis in-house platform Genesis Labs, which promotes out-of-the-box ideas.

While working in South Africa and Indonesia, Hérault had seen a severe mismatch between the boxes of blister packs and the financial means of people in low-income areas. While month-long, or multi-month-long, treatment supplies are good options where people can afford them, these boxes are prohibitively expensive for the many who can’t.

Pharmacists in these settings do what they can – cutting up blister packs to give patients only what they can afford – but the individual blisters don’t protect the product as well. There’s also none of the usual product safety and dosing instructions that should accompany a medication. In the worst-case scenarios, patients may turn to the counterfeit market, where there is no guarantee they are getting any real treatment at all.

“I’d always kept this idea in my mind of adapting the packaging for these settings, but until now such innovations were out of my department’s strategies,” Hérault explains. “When the Genesis Labs Initiative opened to Novartis Technical Operations, I saw the chance to bring this idea back because I think there’s really something behind it.”

Preparing the samples.

On-the-go market

“Whenever I go to a country on a work visit, I spend some time in the pharmacies to see and understand where and how our products are sold,” Hérault says. “This helps a lot to design the right packaging.”

It was on such visits that Hérault saw pharmacists splitting blister packs and he also noticed that, in the streets around, many other items – like food and candy – were sold as strips of individually packed items that people could buy on-the-go based on what they could afford.

The Roll_U Genesis Labs project is now giving Hérault and his team the opportunity to design a similar style packaging for medicines. The Genesis Labs Initiative funds innovative projects that fall outside of the normal scope of Novartis business objectives and, in 2018, Hérault and his colleagues, Peter Vogel, Marcal Bosch and Kevin Meagher, won Genesis funding to pursue their idea starting in January 2019.

The team has brought together experts in packaging materials, machinery and digital mobile solutions to prototype a new pack in a dispenser box, as well as an accompanying digital app. The team is also avoiding PVC plastic – a nearly universal component in blister packs – because it produces toxic fumes when burned, which is common for waste disposal. Each dose will contain a code to help track adherence and verify its authenticity too, if needed.

“Our vision is to create a new packaging standard for the pharmaceutical industry – one that’s first tailored to patients’ needs in low-income countries,” explains Hérault.

Setting up the machine.

Unconventional partnerships

Blister packs and plastic pill bottles are so entrenched in pharmaceutical packaging that Hérault knew that they needed to look elsewhere for packaging partners.

“I had a gut feeling that pharma suppliers would be too constrained by the existing pharma world, where their idea of innovation is a different line of blister packs,” Hérault explains. “We really wanted to think outside of the box.”

So the team sought out partners who were already experts in individual servings – the food and sweets packaging industry. But medicines have different requirements than sweets. Pills and tablets are generally smaller than candies, and their shelf life is often years as opposed to weeks or months.

“Making sure our partners understood our specific pharmaceutical needs was one of the main challenges we’ve faced so far,” Hérault details. “Several potential partners told us that they weren’t interested because of our requirements – such as a long-lasting airtight seal – but a few agreed to partner with us.”

Since the beginning of the year, the team has already made rapid progress on their objectives – identifying new partners, materials and machinery. With the help of the Novartis Social Business team led by Harald Nusser, they have also completed market research in Kenya, where they are planning to pilot their idea using the diabetes treatment metformin. The accompanying mobile application is on track for the pilot as well.

Taking inspiration from candy packages

Checking quality of the products before packaging.

Gearing for the future

“Even in low-income areas, there’s very high mobile phone penetration in Kenya – approximately 90 percent – and a lot is done through SMS, including a whole payment structure,” says Kevin Meagher, a business analyst in the Web Social Mobile Center of Excellence in Novartis Business Systems. “There’s very fast growth in smart phone use as well.” Meagher, the team’s mobile solutions expert, is developing both an SMS and a smart phone application to deliver the information that would normally be included in the product leaflet, as well as reminders to help patients adhere to their treatment regimens. Applications will also be designed for healthcare providers and pharmacists – who mostly have smart phones already – to provide them with product and disease information and training materials.

“We’re gearing for where the market will go in the future rather than being blocked by the current circumstances,” Hérault clarifies, predicting that less expensive smart phones will be increasingly available in the coming years. The mobile apps are also presenting opportunities to guarantee the authenticity of Novartis products while simultaneously collecting data about counterfeits.

“One of the key things we’ve learned so far was about using this new packaging as an opportunity to check for counterfeit products,” Meagher explains. “If a pharmacist scans a product and it gets flagged as counterfeit, our programs can now record when and where that occurred, providing actionable insights for Novartis teams and health authorities.”

From blister packs to individual servings – what is usual for the candy maker industry could make a difference for patients in low- and middle-income countries.

Kenya and beyond

In addition to preparing for the last phase of the project – the pilot in Kenya – the team is already preparing business cases for other products and patient populations that might benefit from the Roll_U design. They are also preparing to test how well the packs perform for molecules that are less stable than metformin, which they selected as a test case partly due to its high stability.

“We’ve already learned a lot about different challenges and we’ve been able to share that with the wider development community looking to develop products in areas with similar needs,” says Meagher. “Beyond the short duration of the Genesis project, I think the benefit of our work will be felt on multiple projects – we’ll see fingerprints on other patient solutions going forward.”

If their pilot is successful, Hérault sees potential outside of low-income settings too. “I see opportunities in hospitals, where there is a lot of waste in the supply chain,” Hérault explains. “We’re not aiming to replace blister packs or plastic bottles, but to complement these standards where it makes market and business sense – hopefully we can prove that this has potential beyond Kenya.”

*Roll_U-Genesis is the internal project name.

Taking inspiration from candy packages

Your privacy is important for us.

Strictly necessary cookies

Performance cookies