Repackaging of medicines is the most important thing to be performed when packaging and supplying them to other suppliers and also patients worldwide. Every pharmaceutical packaging company involves three steps of medication packaging which includes primary or ordinary packaging, secondary and tertiary packaging.

• Primary packaging – It is the normal form of packing medicines and is the first step in supplying them to patients.
• Secondary packaging – One can do this type of packaging in numerous forms and the most common forms include paper and boards, corrugated fibres and boxes, and cartons. They are used to group individual packages of pharmaceuticals together and you have to keep in mind that each and every product requires unique packaging materials.
• Tertiary packaging – It is used for the safety and shipping of products, which is an important part of the shipping process, as pharmaceutical products are incredibly fragile and require excellent safety during transport. Therefore, choosing the right tertiary packaging solutions for distribution of medicine is extremely needed for their safety transportation.

Steps involved in repackaging

As you all know that repackaging of medicines is nothing but taking medicines say tablets from its original packaging and placing them in a small, safe and simple type of packaging. This process is extremely useful for the patients as they are separated into individual packets and making them to keep track of their medication doses.

The detailed steps involved in repackaging medication are as follows:

1. In the first step, the medicines are received from the manufacturers and placed in the repository of repackaging firms.
2. Next, the specifications of each and every medicine are noted down.
3. Then, they have to be approved by their clients.
4. After the client approval, they have to start producing the containers for those tablets.
5. Once their production is completed, the next thing to be done is checking their quality and there will be a quality control team which examines this.
6. After the quality check is made, the medications are shipped to respective suppliers or sellers of those medicines.
7. The last and final step of this process is delivery and in this step, they will deliver those packaged medicines to the consumers.

There will be also some more additional steps like environmental testing, labeling, securing items and recording that will take place within each process in order to make patients to receive high quality medicines.

Even though the number of research animals has been reduced by more than 50% since the 1990s, millions of animals are still used worldwide for research of diseases and their cure. One of the areas that still relies on research animals, is antibody production. And in order to understand why, we first need to go over the basics of an antibody.

Why antibodies are invaluable

The overall goal of the human immune system is to protect the well-being of the body. This is done by removing or dismantling foreign threats like bacteria or virus. Different defense steps are quickly put in place to prevent damages to tissues and organs. One system part is thus designed to destroy foreign cells directly, whereas another part produces antibodies.

Each antibody binds to a specific target (and only one target, if it works properly). The antibody’s ability to bind to the target is called the antibody’s ‘specificity’. After binding, the immune system discovers the antibody, now bound to the foreign cell. It will then destroy it, if it poses a threat.

Vaccinations exploit just this function: Weakened bacteria/virus (depending on what you want to fight) is introduced to the body, to make it produce antibodies against them. In this way, the immune system can withstand the bacteria/virus faster and more efficiently, the next time it comes across them.

How antibodies are produced and applied

Antibodies cannot be made artificially with chemicals. Instead they must be produced in a mammalian immune system. As humans may not be used for production, common animals used for this purpose are rabbits, goats, sheep, dogs, horses etc.

The antibody production follows a common process: The targets (antigens), which we want to produce antibodies against, are injected into the animals’ bloodstreams. Thereafter, their immune systems create specific antibodies within several weeks. Finally, the antibodies are harvested from the blood and the animals are thus sacrificed in the process.

As mentioned earlier, the antibodies can be used to treat specific diseases and conditions. However, they are also used by the biopharmaceutical industry toevaluate and reduce the amount of impurities in medicine. This measurementis made by a technique called Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA), which uses antibodies produced by research animals.

But is this really the only way to do it – by killing hundreds of thousands of animals in the process?

To the rescue: A brand new technique

Luckily, antibodies are no longer needed to measure the amount of impurities in medicine. Mass spectrometry, a method that can detect and precisely determine the amount of all molecules in a sample, is now being rolled out to all biotech and pharma companies.

This method is perfect for host cell protein analysis, where all impurities (proteins) from the production host (bacteria or yeast) are detected. Since the method does not use anything besides a few chemicals, some gas and electricity, it will for certain revolutionize the need for research animals in antibody production.