Preparing Combination Products for Transport

At HealthPack in Albuquerque March 6-8, Anthony Alleva, technical services manager, TCP Reliable (www.tcpreliable.com), will speak about preparing drug/device combination products in the cold-chain distribution system. Many of these combination products include both temperature-sensitive and non-temperature-sensitive items, and Alleva will explain some ways packaging engineers can divide these components into separate cavities.

“I have seen temperature-sensitive products packaged along with scissors, but there is no need to keep the scissors cold. These items can be compartmentalized,” he explains, “which could save development costs.”

Alleva recently helped a customer by developing a multicavity shipper that held cells at –80° C in one area and blood at 2–8° C in another.

He adds that manufacturers of electronics also need to worry about moisture as well as extreme hot or cold. “All requirements for combination products need to be outlined properly and fully communicated during the design process,” he says.

Alleva will also be comparing the use of solid modeling and iterative modeling during shipper development. “We have run parallel processes in which one used physical designs for chamber studies and the other used iterative models with finite element calculations. The physical process could take up to two weeks, compared with the iterative process, which takes about a day and allows you to do several iterations at a time. Iterative modeling can save time to market,” Alleva concludes.

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