This chapter answers parts from Section A(ii) of the 2017 CICM Primary Syllabus, which invites the exam candidate to "describe the pharmaceutics and formulation of drugs", "including packaging" among other things. The examiners attributed a L2 level of importance to this competence, which basically means you can safely ignore it. In support of this statement, the author presents the evidence that historically no written paper exam question has ever interrogated this topic. As such, the time-poor candidate can safely move on to briefly skim through the enantiomerism chapter, becayse that was the only aspect of pharmaceutics to ever merit an SAQ in the primaries.
To return to the topic, drug packaging and labelling is an important aspect of pharmaceutics. It determines a whole series of qualities:
To borrow brevity from Kenagy and Stein (2002),
"Drug names, labels, and packages are not selected and designed in accordance with human factors principles."
To rephrase, an ideal drug name is
None of these principles seem to matter when you are trying to push the drug through the approval process and to market. Only later is it discovered that the poor handwriting of doctors leads nurses to confuse your arthritis drug for an antiepileptic (Hoffman et al, 2003). Of course after you have marketed under a certain brand name it is unlikely that you will ever change it.
That sounds highly critical of the industry, and of course it is, but there is also a difficulty therer which is rarely recognised. For instance, when naming a drug do you follow chemical nomenclature and base your name on the molecular structure, or do you name the drug according to its pharmacodynamic effects even though it is structurally unique from its classmates? And what if the function is not completely understood? We can't even agree on what to call the class frequently, or how to define these loose boundaries. King et al (2002) explore this problem in the realm of psychitaric drug nomenclature. Things get worse when there are entrenched cultural differences in nomenclature (eg. adrenaline vs. epinephrine).
Each drug essentially has three names, which makes matters even more confusing:
The WHO has a statement on "generic" names, more properly known as International Nonproprietary Names (INN). Their Guidelines on the Use of INNs (1997) is a comprehensive document. The principles of naming generic drugs are outlined in their brief guidance page.
The label on a box of ampoules might read "Metoprolol", but you might be looking for metaraminol and only see the "M" in your resuscitation frenzy. Disaster may ensue. Ergo, labels are important. Geetu and Girish (2010) cite labeling as the the central cause of medication errors in the United States. In brief:
To determine how this could be happening, Shrank et al (2007) evaluated a pile of drug labels from pharmacy-dispensed preparations. The following issues were identified:
The following recommendations for improvement of label safety can be made (this list is copied directly from Geetu and Girish, 2010)
The Australian TGA has moved even further with this and introduced new clearer labeling rules in 2016, as a legal act (Therapeutic Goods Order No. 91 - Standard for labels of prescription and related medicines.) Human-readable guidelines are also available. The order writers have clearly absorbed all the esoteric literature on the subjectr, as their guidelines are insanely prescriptive (including, for example, a specific definition of text height, so that a minimum height of 1.5mm can be made standard).
Drug packaging is more than a vehicle for branding and advertising. As per Dean (Pain & Lockhart, 2012), packaging is
" an economical means of providing protection, presentation, identification, information and convenience for a pharmaceutical product from the time of manufacture to the time of its use."
Whereas labeling problems are a source of expensive medication errors, packaging problems are a source of drug recalls. There are multiple issues to consider. For instance, a packaging design may need to possess a range of protective properties:
Other issues which must be considered:
Even weirder:
Excellent example of major packaging problems are drugs like sodium nitroprusside (which should not be exposed to light) and paraldehyde (which will happily dissolve its way out of any plastic container). So important is the problem of packaging-drug interaction that experimental interaction studies to explore it are an expensive part of drug manufacture (Feenstra et al, 2014). Terminology like "packaging-drug partition coefficient" are used to describe the slow creep of packaging polymers into the coated tablet.
Kenagy, John W., and Gary C. Stein. "Naming, labeling, and packaging of pharmaceuticals." American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy 58.21 (2001): 2033-2041.
Hoffman, James M., and Susan M. Proulx. "Medication errors caused by confusion of drug names." Drug Safety 26.7 (2003): 445-452.
King, Caroline, and Lakshmi NP Voruganti. "What's in a name? The evolution of the nomenclatureof antipsychotic drugs." Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 27.3 (2002): 168.
George, C. F. "Naming of drugs: pass the epinephrine, please." BMJ: British Medical Journal 312.7042 (1996): 1315.
WHO: Guidelines on the Use of INNs for Pharmaceutical Substances (1997)
Shrank, William H., et al. "The variability and quality of medication container labels." Archives of internal medicine 167.16 (2007): 1760-1765.
Paine, Frank A., and H. Lockhart. Packaging of pharmaceuticals and healthcare products. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
Feenstra, Peter, Michael Brunsteiner, and Johannes Khinast. "Prediction of drug-packaging interactions via molecular dynamics (MD) simulations."International journal of pharmaceutics 431.1 (2012): 26-32.
Feenstra, Peter, Michael Brunsteiner, and Johannes Khinast. "Investigation of Migrant–Polymer Interaction in Pharmaceutical Packaging Material Using the Linear Interaction Energy Algorithm." Journal of pharmaceutical sciences103.10 (2014): 3197-3204.