Safeguarding toxic or expensive drugs

Glass vials are still widely used in laboratory or medical settings. Injection vials are often filled with substances that could potentially harm users and compromise occupational safety, for example, cytotoxic drugs used in chemotherapy. Moreover, many biological drug formulations that are commonly packaged in glass vials are very costly.

For those reasons, it is essential to safeguard the vials against breakage and leakage. Röchling Medical was consulted to develop a protective plastic packaging solution to achieve just that.

Requirements:

Robust, secure plastic protectors for glass injection vials
Secure protection against breakage and leakage
Must pass drop tests at different heights
Suitable for different vial sizes
Vial label needs to be readable through the protective packaging

Forward-thinking design and intelligent tooling

We designed a protective solution that holds each glass vial firmly in place with no rattling or movement, thereby eliminating the risk of breakage or leakage while in transit or during application.

Our standardized outer packaging can accommodate glass vials of different sizes (3 ml to 20 ml), passes all drop tests and is made from a transparent material to allow vial labels to be read.

Our team achieved this by developing a multi-tool, consisting of a fixed tool part for the outer casing of the protective container and exchangeable tool inserts. This allowed for the tool core to be flexibly replaced depending on the required vial size (3 ml to 20 ml).

We applied the same outer geometry, but different inner geometries to accommodate for spacers and centering elements for the range of different vial sizes. In addition, we opted to use snap-on caps instead of screw caps: the simpler closure mechanism ensures easier processing on the filling line.

Smart standard solution for the protection of various vial sizes

Overall, the implementation of the project was geared towards sustainability.

Design for manufacturability principles was systematically applied. This concerns on the one hand the design of the outer packaging in terms of item weight, number of tools and tooling costs and, on the other hand, ease of filling and final assembly on the part of the customer.

Advantages:

One standard protective solution fits vials from 3 ml up to 20 ml.
Due to the protective vials' standardized outer geometry, the customer can fill and process all sizes on the same filling line.
The economic multi-tool set-up with exchangeable tool core dramatically reduces the required number of different tools for manufacturing protective containers for a range of different vial sizes.
The snap-on cap can be pressed on in a single step after filling and reduces the need for handling on the customer's side.