Carded Blister Helps Patients Fight Disease

Tuesday July 10, 2007
Blister packaging helps patients reduce errors when taking medication.

By Daphne Allen

Perhaps the biggest advantage blister packaging holds is its ability to encourage compliance. With regimens broken down by day or even by time of day, patients are more likely to stick to their schedules and catch mistakes quickly.

That's what Curt Humiston is counting on. Humiston is director of materials management for Eisai Pharmaceuticals. One of his current projects is overseeing the sample packaging of Eisai's drug for Alzheimer's disease, Aricept.

Packaging Insights Inc. (Norris, TN), the contract firm with which Humiston is working, assembles Fight Back kits containing two strengths of Aricept, 5 and 10mg. The kits are designed to help patients currently taking one 5-mg tablet of Aricept per day titrate up to 10mg. "This kit concentrates on a certain group of patients whose conditions have progressed to the point where they need stronger dosages. The kit helps them ramp up over 35 days," says Humiston.

Aricept was approved in 1998, and the Fight Back kit is now in its third year of production. In addition to a multipanel blister card, the kit includes a patient insert as well as an informational booklet that addresses patients, doctors, and caregivers. The kit is supplied in a carton with a tamper-evident label.

Between the panels containing 5-mg and 10-mg tablets is a perforation, explains Humiston. "We've chosen this feature so that doctors can hold onto the 10-mg-tablet panel in case they want to see the patients before they start to titrate up," he says. "It is designed to be a controlled regimen." Since Eisai is now in its third year of distributing the kits, Humiston says that the kits appear to be well received.

Like many drugs, however, Aricept is supplied in a blister only for samples and kits. Humiston says that there are no plans "to move regular scripts into blisters." It is too difficult to predict the regimens that doctors will prescribe, he adds.

Because the Fight Back kit is classified as a physician's sample, it does not require child resistance. So, to save on the costs of applying a heat-seal coating to the paperboard, which can be used to provide child resistance, Packaging Insights used a release liner to seal the cards with pressure. The cards are double coated for two-sided printing to capture all the marketing graphics, and the two blisters fit into die-cut windows and are trapped by adhesive.

Paul Glintenkamp, director of pharmaceutical packaging for Packaging Insights, says that his firm is working on a "child-resistance distinction for its release-liner design. We see a lot of interest in compliance packaging, and we are trying to make it more affordable." He adds that this type of kit assembly requires no automation. "It is very attractive for both clinical packaging and production environments," he says.

Humiston adds that there seems "to be more play" in this type of kit. "I have seen other companies interested in this type of format. It represents the product well, and there is a lot of space for information and graphics."

Published in Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News

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