Essentra Packaging and AMD announce smart packaging collaboration to boost cold chain pharma security

Essentra Packaging, a multinational packaging specialist to the healthcare, personal care and beauty industries, today announced its collaboration with Advanced Material Development (“AMD”) in developing a new generation of Time Temperature Indicators (“TTIs”), an accurate and cost effective smart packaging technology for the pharmaceutical sector.

The project will combine the unique strengths of Essentra Packaging and AMD, delivering relevant future packaging solutions and enhancing patient safety. Essentra Packaging will provide its Packaging industry knowledge specifically focused on the unique needs of the pharmaceutical market, its applications skills and technology, and its strong customer portfolio. AMD will leverage its technology knowledge and advances in the field of colour-changing polymeric photonic crystals led by Dr Izabela Jurewicz, Chief Scientific Officer at AMD, and developed by the AMD teams at the Universities of Surrey and Sussex.

The project aims to deliver on two of Essentra Packaging’s key innovation themes, patient safety and agile supply. The business believes that technology focused on packaging should be simple to implement in order to drive real change and seeks to demonstrate this through its collaboration with AMD.

Tiffany Overstreet, Innovation & Sustainability Director at Essentra Packaging, explains the significance of the project: "When it comes to smart packaging technology, we are all looking to where the next great wave of innovation will come from. Rather than spectate, we are taking the lead through this collaboration with AMD. We’re aiming to break new ground, and better support our customers in the pharmaceutical sector, now and into the future.

"One of the major hurdles for the pharmaceutical packaging sector today is that technologies such as TTIs are important for patient safety, particularly in today’s more complex and cold chain supply routes, but are often cost-prohibitive to implement. We want to change that from the ground up – we’re taking tomorrow’s pharma packaging technology and shaping it into something today’s packaging designers can access. What we are creating is new to today’s market and we’re proud to be working with a true industry force in AMD."

Jurewicz said: "What distinguishes our TTI technology is its ability to be customised according to the application or need. The AMD ‘nLight’ photonic crystal platform offers extreme tuneability and adaptability, to give truly market-leading performance."

John Lee, CEO at AMD, commented: "Aside from biologics and pharmaceuticals, the packaging solutions we are developing based on our proprietary nanotechnology in our collaboration with Essentra Packaging also have excellent potential in a wide array of end markets and applications. The result will be cost effective innovations, driving more ubiquitous use of such packaging technologies in and outside of the Pharmaceutical sector. To be working with Essentra as a global leader in this space is a huge milestone for AMD."

For more information contact AMD's Director Business Development, Paul Mumford at paul@amdnano.com
To find out more about Essentra Packaging, please visit https://www.essentra.com/

26-April-2022