Q&A West Pharmaceuticals: Progress through the pandemic
West Pharmaceutical Services is celebrating its 100th birthday in April 2023 and has been providing components for the containment of injectable drugs since its origination. Rebekah Jordan caught up with Cindy Reiss-Clark, chief commercial officer of West, at the recent Pharmapack show, to talk about its latest innovations and progress through the pandemic.
Q. What is West showcasing at Pharmapack 2022?
One of the products we are showcasing here at Pharmapack is our 4040/40 elastomer formulation, focused on raw material selection to make significant progress in mitigating the risk of particulates, extractables & leachables, and fragmentation & coring.
As you know, classes of drugs continue to become more sensitive, and the regulations continue to increase. And so must the innovation - the quality of the material must be stronger and better each time.
Therefore, we're excited about the extractable and leachable profile of this formula that really protects the drug, and it protects the patient. Because you don't want to have something leaching into the drug that shouldn't.
There's the formula itself which is the base. And then there are coatings that we can put on that to give an extra layer of protection as well. A FluroTec film is applied to the top of the stopper to prevent twinning, clumping and sticking and B2-coating provides lubricity for smooth tracking without free silicone oil. I believe that the drug chooses the container. So different technologies and different interactions indicate if you need FluroTec or if you don't need FluroTec. Most of the biologics are highly sensitive that they require the FluroTec coding. It really comes down to the molecule.
Q. What impact did Covid-19 have on West’s objectives?
We have a mantra at West that every component that we make has the patient's name on it, which is a very powerful statement. West is engaged with the majority of COVID-19 vaccine producers.
And so there would be a West component somewhere in every containment area. With that, we felt like we had a very strong responsibility to be able to scale and to support the vaccines in a way that, as the vaccines were being developed and were successful, we wanted to be able to provide what we could to make sure we were a part of the solution. Vaccine developers trusted West as a partner of choice to help protect their sensitive biomolecules. This is a testament to West’s almost 100 years of experience and reputation for leadership in quality. We grew our global workforce to over 10,000 team members, expanding facility and equipment resources and shifting to 24/7 operating schedules at several sites to address the demand for components associated with COVID-19.
Q. In terms of the scale up of vaccines to be produced, did West face any challenges?
We made significant investments because we have a responsibility, not just to support the vaccines, but we have a very wide customer base. We're supporting other lifesaving or life-enhancing medicines as well. It was very important to us to be able to scale in a fashion that we weren't just solely focused on being a solution for COVID-19.
We also needed to support our existing medicines for our patients. We wanted to ensure that we were not the reason a patient couldn't get their medicine. In terms of COVID, supply chains and logistics, it sparks questions like: can you get sufficient transport? Or can you get enough containers to be able to transport your raw materials across the globe? West is not immune to those challenges, but we did a really good job managing those challenges by partnering with companies that really supported us throughout the pandemic in a very strong and effective way.
Furthermore, we have a very large global network and footprint. Because we were able to flex our capacity in a way that, when we first started talking to the vaccine developers, we informed them to consider our entire supply chains, because that would give them the optimal flexibility.
So, the investments we made were across the globe and we made over $300 million of capital, which equated to over 400 pieces of equipment and over a thousand team members. That's the type of scale up that we had to deliver over this period.
Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?
We've recently had two announcements. One of the announcements is a partnership with Corning Glass. We're going to be working closely together to co-develop a suite of offerings for containment. We would look to incorporate their products with ours in terms of viral systems, as well as syringe systems, with different strengthened glasses. This is a very exciting area for us to explore with them which we hope to collectively bring to the healthcare environment.
And another partnership that we've also recently explored is with Pneuma Systems, which is looking at different infusion pumps. In terms of our delivery devices, that enables hospital to home volume delivery, which we hope to develop.
These are early days. We still have a lot to develop and create, but we're very excited about those partnerships specifically for our future.