As the Indian pharmaceutical industry gears up for challenging yet exciting times ahead, the pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers have been pushed beyond their limits to innovate or perish.
The pharmaceutical machinery industry grew tremendously in the 1970s, thanks to the government’s introduction of high import duties to deter increasing foothold of European manufacturers and encourage Indian manufacturing. Since then, the industry has progressed in leaps and bounds as pharmaceutical companies got easy access to cost-effective machineries, giving the Indian pharmaceutical industry a huge boost.
Today, against the global backdrop of numerous blockbuster drugs going off-patent, the Indian pharmaceutical industry has gained increased prominence. The global pharmaceutical giants find it increasingly necessary to not only offer affordable medicines, but make them accessible to regions such as Africa. According to McKinsey’s report titled, “India Pharma 2020,” the Indian pharmaceuticals market will grow to US $55 billion by 2020, not just in terms of scale but also volumes. This, in turn, will push pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers beyond their limits to innovate, offer advanced technologies, and yet maintain a competitive advantage (over European manufacturers) in terms of cost.
One such pharmaceutical manufacturer is ACG Worldwide. With over fifty years of experience, the company offers a wide range of manufacturing and packaging solutions to the global pharmaceutical industry. Its offerings under pharma machinery include encapsulation machines, tablet presses, blister packing and cartoning machines.
Encapsulation
Capsules, the other most dominant form of oral solid dosage, are elegant, portable, and easy to use as well as easy to administer. As compared to tabletting process, which requires pressure to compact powder into tablet resulting in high loss of costly APIs, there is no such wastage in a capsule-filling process.
Besides manufacturing standard encapsulation machines to fill powders/pellets, ACG understands the criticality of certain drugs that need to be filled in liquids. Fluidocap, a range of encapsulation machines for filling liquids and band-sealing liquid in hard capsules, is a latest from ACG, offering an output ranging from 40,000 to 70,000 capsules per hour.
In addition, pharmaceutical companies seek customized attachments on their existing encapsulation machines to offer combination-filled capsules. By allowing gentle dosing of granules, pellets, powder, mini & micro tablets, capsules, and softgel, all in one capsule combination, pharma companies have found increased patient compliance due to ease of administering and attractive appearance.
Today, about 50% of new chemical entities in the pipeline are highly potent, with sales for high-potency pharmaceutical ingredients expected to take off majorly. Most of the oncology drugs, opioids, hormonal agents and prostaglandins fall under this category. This calls for development of containment capsule-filling technologies, which not only protects the environment but also the personnel handling these potent drugs. ACG’s high-containment special purpose automatic capsule-filler, Securefill 12T, was built for this cause.
Tabletting
Although the operating principle and fundamental design of a rotary tablet press has remained so for the last few decades, pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers have made multiple machine design improvements to cater to challenging requirements of the future. Features like an interchangeable turret system, virtually tool-less design and automatic dual micro-dosing lubrication system were introduced as special features a few years ago, but are standard requirements for today’s tabletting machines.
ACG’s Destiny 8100 (output: 1 million tablets per hour) has the capability to produce bilayer tablets with the help of a retrofittable kit. Pharmaceutical companies across the world are treating different ailments in a patient at the same time or administering multi-drug therapies for a single illness through bilayer tablets. They are also being considered for controlling release profiles of separate incompatible APIs or administering fixed dose combinations of different APIs. In addition, ACG’s high-speed high-volume tabletting machines Legacy 6100 (output: 400,000 tablets per hour) has been at the forefront in adding Multi-Unit Particulate System (MUPS) capabilities.
Blister Packing & Cartoning
Packaging technologies such as blister packing and cartoning show considerable potential for growth. Today, packaging machinery manufacturers are facing stiff competition on two fronts – price (from Chinese manufacturers) and quality (from European manufacturers). ACG, through its vast experience and strong focus on innovation, has overcome these challenges to a large extent. Offering blister packing and cartoning machines such as B45 and K120i respectively for pharmaceutical as well as several non-pharma applications, ACG has demonstrated capabilities such as speed, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and compactness.
Equipment manufacturers like ACG specialises in both lab-scale machine models and commercial equipment support the industry with technical & development support for scale-up. However, in areas where ACG has not been able to directly address the needs of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, it has tied up with few global manufacturers to bring their class-leading technologies to India. Today, ACG’s pharmaceutical machinery partners include Pharmagel (softgel encapsulation), Alphaphoenix (cGMP washers), Truking (sterile injectable machineries), Azbil Telstar (Lyophilization) and Dara (syringe filling & closing lines), while packaging machinery partners include TGM (flow wrapping), Effytec (horizontal form fill sealing), PFM (vertical form fill sealing) and shrink wrapping (Autopack).
As the generics boom kicks-in, pharmaceutical companies worldwide look towards experienced partners like ACG Worldwide to offer best-in-class solutions as well as cost-effective methods of producing effective and affordable healthcare.
(The author is Head - Corporate Marketing, ACG Worldwide)