The Ultimate Buyer's Guide for Purchasing Pharmaceutical Solutions
Buyer's Guides - Pharma Technology Focus | Issue 143 | June
Buyer's Guides
Buyer's Guides act as a downloadable directory for industry buyers actively searching for a product or service. Our Buyer's Guides contain detailed information on the suppliers and their product lines, alongside contact details to aid your purchasing decision.
Freeze drying is a crucial technique to prolong the shelf life of pharmaceutical products. Also known as lyophilisation, the technique stabilises and preserves sensitive products such as biologics, and diagnostic kits, in a permanently storable state.
Choosing high-quality equipment for conducting calibrations on instruments can augment the instrument efficiency, accuracy, safety, and overall performance and enhance the brand value of the companies performing the analysis, testing, or measurement.
Commercial dose non-sterile liquid and semi-solid products, such as ointments, gels, and topical creams, offer a number of advantages to users, such as individual dosing, ease of use and suitability for paediatric and geriatric populations.
Clinical packaging and labelling follow stringently controlled procedures and high-standard quality control measures to assure the safety and functionality of investigational medicinal products, during their storage, distribution, and use. Unlike commercial pharmaceutical packaging, the primary consideration in clinical trial packaging services is protecting the product quality and reliability for research.
The development of biological drugs such as gene and cell therapies and vaccines is boosting the production of injectable drug products in the global healthcare market. Chronic illnesses, ageing population, and faster approval of sterile injectables compared to other drug types are some of the factors responsible for the increase in demand for injectables.
Rising healthcare expenditure, growing geriatric population, increasing incidence of chronic diseases, patent expiration of blockbuster drugs, and increased consumption of generic drugs have created opportunities for API chemical companies, which can provide their expertise to pharmaceutical companies.
Packaging plays a vital role in maintaining the quality, safety, user-friendliness and marketability of drugs and other pharmaceutical products.
API peptides and protein-based drugs are promising therapeutics for the treatment of a variety of metabolic and oncological disorders. More than 100 approved peptide-based therapeutics are currently available in the market, while more than 600 peptide-based pharmacological leads are being investigated worldwide, across various phases of development.
Commercial dose companies form a critical component of the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry's value chain. Commercial dose form manufacturing follows API manufacturing to produce the final dosage form (FDF) such as tablets, capsules and injectables.
The capital-intensive nature of pharmaceutical drug research and development (R&D) activities and the need to hasten the drug development timelines has resulted in an increase in the outsourcing to clinical dose companies for manufacturing.
Pharmaceutical solid dosage forms are the most popular dosage forms in the pharmaceutical industry and are one of the most used drug delivery methods across patient groups.
Active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) for biologics are witnessing rapid growth as pharmaceutical companies focus on the development of advanced therapeutics.
Pharmaceutical compounding has gained popularity as it helps in preparing personalised medications for patients. The individual ingredients are mixed in the exact strength and dosage form required by the patient by a pharmaceutical compounding company.
Specialty pharmacies play a crucial role in medication dosing, disease and side effects management, and patient care. The expert services rendered by them help in improving patient outcomes, minimising costs of the healthcare system, improving medicinal adherence and persistence and saving clinicians' time.
Failing to adhere to prescribed medication regimens is one of the prime reasons for poor patient health outcomes. Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies are working continuously to improve patient adherence, which also impacts disease control and pharmaceutical industry revenues directly.
Pharmaceutical benefit managers and management companies serve as intermediaries between insurance companies, pharmacies, and drug manufacturers. They bring together employers/plan sponsors, health insurers, plan members, drug wholesalers, pharmacies, and drug companies to facilitate better health outcomes at an affordable cost.
Increasing diagnosis of chronic diseases is expected to lead to fast growth in retail pharmacies. The rising incidence of long-standing diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer requires prolonged medication and, thus, drives the growth and need for retail pharmacies in the market.
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Pharmaceutical wholesalers act as intermediaries between pharmaceutical manufacturers and retailers and facilitate the delivery of the right medicines in a timely, efficient, and secure manner. Wholesale distributors are responsible for guaranteeing product quality and preventing the influx of counterfeited drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies hold permission to market their products directly to consumers. The direct-to-consumer marketing companies for pharmaceuticals are increasingly moving online as it supports the digitisation of information, enabling patients to take control of their health.
The Complete Guide to Buying Pharmaceutical Equipment
Selecting the Best Pharmaceutical Equipment for Your Manufacturing Needs
When shopping for new pharmaceutical equipment, manufacturers need to identify the best products that can meet their facility's current needs as well as anticipated future growth. When your scope of work increases, having a sound mechanical infrastructure in place can ensure that you are ready to meet demand.
Today, we are going to cover what you need to know about purchasing the right equipment for your pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. First, we are going to start with selecting machinery by size.
Selecting the Right Size Pharmaceutical Equipment
If Your Equipment is Too Small
If your packaging and production equipment are not large enough to handle your manufacturing demands, this will halt productivity in little time. Rather than efficiently moving units of product to their packaging phase, batches will take more time to produce. This will leave clients frustrated when they need a quicker turnaround.
Overstressing smaller equipment will also cause it to break down more frequently. This results in increased repair costs and may require a replacement in the near future.
If Your Machines are Too Large
Machines that are too large for your facility will compete against other necessary equipment for floor space. They also will likely cost more to purchase and install while not performing to their full potential. This can quickly generate a poor return on investment by over-anticipating future scope.
Conversely, you might need large equipment that cannot fit in with the rest of the other machinery at your facility. In these cases, it is best to contact the equipment manufacturer or retailer to ask if they have other configuration options for the large equipment. As an example, large gummy manufacturing equipment can also come in a stacked kitchen layout to limit the amount of required floor space.
What is the 'Just Right' Size?
This raises an important question. What is the 'just right' size when selecting your pharmaceutical equipment?
Review your historical records to track your facility's growth rate. Has your scope of work increased by a certain percentage over the past few quarters, months, or years? Take this information into account to predict near-future increases in production demands. From there, you can select a machine that can meet your current needs and handle larger future batches.
The Right Equipment for Your Production Team
Beyond selecting the proper-size equipment for your facility, the size of your team and their current internal capacity should help influence your purchasing decisions. For example, two key factors to consider include:
- Desired levels of automation and human operation
- Current size of your team and capacity
Aligning the right tools with the people operating them will result in greater productivity for your facility. This not only boosts efficiency but can also help increase your scope as well as generate bottom-line benefits.
Essential Equipment for Your Facility
Professional-Grade Pharmaceutical Production Equipment
Using professional-grade production equipment ensures a higher-quality finished product more consistently. Without the right machinery to meet demand, the rest of the manufacturing process rapidly loses productivity.
Packaging Machinery
After you've finished your production run, you need something to package your fresh product in. Packaging machinery automates this process for you in large quantities so that you can move on to the next phase of your manufacturing cycle.
Popular types of packaging equipment include:
- Rapid channel counters for counting individual units of product
- Conveyors for moving units to their packaging destination
- Dessicant inserters for controlling moisture levels and restricting product movement
- Baggers for containing loose units of product
- Cappers for consistently closing bottle and jar containers
- Blisterpaks for simple and effective single-dose packaging
- Labelers for efficient application to product containers
Proper Quality Control Equipment
Quality control equipment helps your team ensure that you are creating quality consumer products that are safe and effective. Depending on the products you're manufacturing, quality control equipment can vary in function and purpose.
For example, a water activity meter aids QC professionals in examining water activity levels in gummies, but it would not prove as useful for a dry medium like tablets. Similarly, a hardness tester will not serve any purpose for examining liquid pharmaceuticals.
Should You Buy Used Pharmaceutical Equipment?
Buying used pharmaceutical equipment can help manufacturers save on purchasing costs. However, when you are browsing used listings, be sure that you are working with an established equipment retailer with the knowledge to vet quality used products as well as service or refurbish them to production-ready condition before listing for sale.
For more information, please visit Pharmaceutical Solutions.