How Pharmaceutical Companies Can Increase Production to Help Fight Covid-19

Since the Corona cases soared in February 2020, the world has come to a halt, except for the Healthcare sector, where, people are doing whatever it takes to stop the spread of this infection and cure the thousands that are infected.

While the pharma industry is working day in and day out to manufacture the drugs like Acetaminophen that provide symptomatic relief for Corona infection, researchers are experimenting with drug combinations for faster treatment, to minimize the mortality rate and increase the chances of survival & recovery. Combinations of Anti-viral drugs like Lopinavir, Ritonavir & Remdesivir and Anti-malarial drugs like Chloroquine & Hydroxychloroquine are said to be the most promising therapies by the WHO. If they are proven to be effective, Pharma companies manufacturing these products will be under tremendous strain to manufacture large volumes of these medications and will need to work on maximizing their production efficiencies to minimize downtime for maximum output.

While Lopinavir – Ritonavir combination is available in multiple forms, film coated tablets are preferred over soft gel capsules due to its relaxed storage conditions at room temperature as compared to refrigeration needs for capsules. The pigmented film coating not only helps in differentiating multiple products and strengths but also provides some amount of protection against humidity. It also provides a level of taste masking for improved palatability of these extremely bitter pills. In coated tablets of Chloroquine and symptomatic relief drugs like Acetaminophen, Titanium Dioxide plays an important role in the film coating as a barrier to light for the photo-sensitive active.

How to Clean Pigmented Film Coating?

While the polymers commonly used in film coatings are not very difficult to clean by themselves, it’s the added pigment that leaves behind a haze, which becomes a cleaning issue over time. These pigments have the tendency to bond to the stainless steel and need scrubbing to be separated from the equipment surface, resulting in longer cleaning cycles.

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Because the polymers clean up easily, it is quite difficult to identify the cleaning problems initially. After a few cleaning cycles with wrong detergent, a tint or a haze develops that builds up over time, which cannot be cleaned easily, even after thorough cleaning. The plants that are aware of this problem use the traditional cleaning procedure that includes a two detergent process of alternating highly alkaline detergents for the polymer and highly a highly acidic detergent for the insolubles.

• The procedure is time-consuming procedure with multiple alternating detergent and re-cleaning steps, especially with film coatings containing high polymer. This increases the equipment downtime and decreases productivity
• Manual scrubbing is necessary to get rid of the pigment haze and can be cumbersome for larger equipment
• Due to the use of highly alkaline and acidic detergents, EHS concerns could arise. For manual cleaning, this is a safety risk
• Due to multiple detergent and multi-step process, there is excessive water consumption

The other cleaning methods include the use of water, plain alkaline detergent and/or solvents. In this case, the chemical strips away the polymer, but doesn’t address the pigment residue, which is observed once the equipment is dry. Removal of this haze, once separated from the formulation residue, is extremely tough and needs extensive action / scrubbing as well as it is a highly time-consuming process.

Intermittent Cleaning is Doing More Harm Than Good

To help clean faster, some companies use intermittent water washes for minor cleaning cycles, without which, their existing cleaners cannot clean residue left behind by campaign batch processing. With internal lab studies, we have proven that this is not a good idea as it causes heavy hazes that are very difficult to clean.

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