Essentra Packaging, a multi-national packaging specialist to the healthcare, personal care and beauty industries, has announced its collaboration with Advanced Materials 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 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 needs of the pharmaceutical market, its application skills and technology, and its strong customer portfolio. AMD will leverage its technology knowledge and advances in the field of color-changing polymeric photonic crystals led by 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 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 and 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,” adds Overstreet. “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 states, “What distinguishes our TTI technology is its ability to be customized according to the application or need. The AMD nLight phtonic crystal platform offers extreme tuneability and adaptability to give truly market-leading performance”.

John Lee, CEO at AMD, comments, “Looking outside biologics and pharmaceuticals, the technologies we are developing in our collaboration with Essentra Packaging have excellent potential in a wide array of markets and end applications. The result will be cost effective innovations, driving more ubiquitous use of such packaging technologies in the pharmaceutical sector. To be working with Essentra as a global leader is a huge milestone for AMD.”