When pharmaceutical companies develop a new medication, they rely on clinical trials to see if the medication works. However, it is critical to know whether a patient is actually using the medication.
 
Information Mediary Corp. (IMC),  Ottawa, ON, has developed technology that allows all of the stakeholders to monitor the usage of these medications. With more than a million units sold to date and new products on the way, including IMC’s Med-ic smart blister packs and syringe packs, IMC is poised to help improve the health of patients.
 
IMC’s beginnings date back to Interphex in 2002, when the company announced that it would specialize in adherence packaging, The first products were released later that year, and IMC has been working on developing its systems since then. IMC uses hybrid systems, combining printed electronics, RFID and traditional electronics for its Med-ic smart blister packs and other systems.
 
“Our smart packaging is designed for pharmaceuticals, with an emphasis on clinical trials, which offer a highest rate of return for end customers,” IMC COO Michael Petersen said. “Sometimes the researcher can’t be sure if a drug isn’t working because of lacking efficacy or because patients haven’t been taking it as directed. The pharmaceutical companies are interested in reducing the size of the trials, and this allows them to bring their products to market faster and get more accurate data.
 
“We are really trying to objectively observe adherence, and then have the healthcare provider, the clinical staff at the trial site, the doctor or pharmacist read the device and have a look at their adherence profile from the past week, month or three months and coach the patient about it,” Petersen added.
 
Smart packaging is a combination of branding and functionality, and Petersen said that blister packs have the ability to combine both of these needs.
 
“With blister medication packages, you have a lot of real estate to work with in terms of the graphics and for us to hide the electronics,” he noted. “With medication packaging, the more sophisticated packaging surrounds the blister with cardboard, which is very suitable for printed electronics to detect each dose being taken from each package, as well as hiding traditional electronics in the structure. However, on our smart bottle caps, we have no opportunity to use printed electronics.”
 
The adaptation of near field communication (NFC) has been a key to IMC’s technology.
 
“We have been using NFC since the beginning,” said Petersen. “Fifteen years ago, there was no standard that allowed you to read it on someone’s laptop, but now we scan it on Android smartphones. The move to NFC was natural for us. On the other hand, we do get some requests for Bluetooth, but Bluetooth is battery intensive, and requires that patients connect the device and make sure it is live. It leads to a lot of technology hassles for the patient. We don’t want to interfere with what the patient normally does.”
 
Information Mediary Corp. recently received the CPES2017 Product Innovation Award for its Med-ic Syringe Pack, which uses NFC to connect a temperature monitored smart package with printed electronic traces. It records real-time information for each syringe. Petersen said that developing the syringe pack, which holds two syringes, was requested by a customer.
 
“The syringe blister pack was made as a prototype for a major pharmaceutical company, which really liked it,” he noted. “The syringe pack is a takeoff of our smart medication blister pack. We added state-of-the-art temperature monitoring on the same package so you can report on storage conditions, which is quite important for biological medications. We also incorporated some feedback where the patient can push a button to indicate their condition.”
 
In November 2016, HealthPrize Technologies published an update to a research paper co-authored with Capgemini that estimated annual pharmaceutical revenue losses of $637 billion due to non-adherence to medications for the treatment of chronic conditions. With these numbers, Petersen said that interest in these technologies is growing.
 
“Pharmaceutical researchers, brand people and public health people know compliance is important,” he observed. “The financial community and the market value this technology highly. We’re seeing increasing acceptance, but the pharmaceutical business is very slow moving and no one wants to take a risk. We have been de-risked, and have sold more than a million pieces already.:
 
Petersen added that one important facet is understanding that these adherence systems are hybrid in nature.
 
“The recognition that PE is part of product design and the electronics ecosystem is a good one as long as everyone realizes that not everything will be printed,” Petersen said. “We are not going to be printing chips soon, and not ever replace all the silicon that is out there. Printed electronics are being used in a sensible way, to augment or innovate existing solutions, invent new solutions with new form factors and really add to the spice of life.
 
“Smart blister medication packs would not be possible with traditional electronics,” he continued. “You’re not going to put an FR4 board on the back of a blister pack. I don’t believe in printing everything, and there are limits. You have to be sensible in what you pick to print.
 
“We have RFID sensor tags that connect to printed traces, and we can easily print out electronic traces that can easily detect each dose removal, and we can adapt this printed circuitry depending on the design of the package and its form factor,” Petersen concluded. “That is the classic example of a hybrid printable electronics application that works really well. Really, printable electronics if used correctly will give you more flexibility, simplicity, faster turnaround, and allows you to economize on customization of the application. You get the best of both worlds.”