Pharma packaging: Counterfeiting remains a menace

Pharma packaging firm Schott Kaisha’s Managing Director Kairus Dadachanji sees a need for the country to provide a push to the primary packaging segment as well as address the menace of counterfeiting.

“The most important thing the nation needs to address is counterfeit,” he declared, pointing out how it remained an issue despite packaging being made more difficult to copy.

The company is working with the office of the Drug Controller General and the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India to evolve ways and means to tackle the menace. Underscoring the need to be more strict, he favored a check by the USFDA. Primary packaging is not under the purview of FDA presently and the pharmaceutical companies did the audit, he said.

Mr. Dadachanji was in Hyderabad recently for a seminar the company had organised on latest trends and developments in the pharma packaging.

“The drug authorities in India and abroad explicitly require that pharmaceutical companies manage risks more closely, as patient safety is of utmost importance”, he told the seminar.

Companies like Schott Kaisha, which is an Indo-German joint venture, were morphing into solutions rather than remaining as mere suppliers. They work as partners with pharma companies “from concept to commercialisation,” he said. Such an approach is also driven by the emerging competition. “We are seeing companies absent in India for so many years suddenly seeing interest in India... [they] want to be here and coming,” he said.

Schott Kaisha is a leading supplier to the pharmaceutical industry for a range of small volume tubular glass parenteral packaging, including ampoules, vials, cartridges and sterile prefillable glass syringes.

It exports about 25 per cent of the production, particularly large volumes to South Africa and Mexico. It has manufacturing facilities at Jambusar in Gujarat and Daman, with a total annual capacity of 2.5 billion pieces, and giving shape to expansion plans. 

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/pharma-packaging-counterfeiting-remains-a-menace/article8158396.ece