How innovation is bringing new advantages for pharma customers

Craig Scherer - marketing director for the Insight Innovation Center at Nemera discusses how the company’s extended capabilities in front-end innovation bring new advantages for pharma customers.

In today’s hyper-competitive market, pharma companies cannot afford to ignore three critical success factors: reduced time to market, reduced project and product risk, and an increased focus on patient outcomes. These goals, if they are not already at the center of every pharma company’s business strategy, soon will be.

Providing design research, human factors engineering, user experience design, and design for manufacturing, the Insight Innovation Center at Nemera can help customers navigate their device strategy to achieve these strategic goals.

Reducing Time to Market

In today’s increasingly competitive market, time is money. Delays in development mean lost revenue and market share – getting to market quickly is critical to pharma companies' success.

Having complete-end-to-end capabilities, under one roof, capitalises on efficiencies and promotes more frequent communications throughout development. The Insight Innovation Center offers front-end innovation, design research, human factors, user experience design, lab services, and engineering development all linked to Nemera’s quality good manufacturing practice (GMP) capabilities for clinical and commercial manufacturing. This full suite of offerings provides efficiencies which can greatly reduce time to market.

We employ one quality system so product requirements stay consistent as they travel through development. Additionally, having access to all disciplines during development ensures that there is input across all stages of development. For example, during early engineering, manufacturing continuously weighs in on assembly and cost. Likewise, it’s critical for human factors engineers to stay involved from early concepts through to commercial ramp up to ensure that user needs are supported and that all FDA requirements are satisfied.

Reducing Project and Product Risk

Having all the teams working in close proximity optimises efficiency to reduce overall time in development. The other primary value is continuous communication between disciplines. Insight Innovation Center’s director of Business Development Mark Tunkel says: “The way our user experience, technical and commercial teams interact and support each other throughout the product development process completely alleviates the potential for critical information to get ‘lost in translation.’ As projects are passed between the different disciplines or even between different companies participating in the programme, there isn’t a point where the key players are not intrinsically involved in some way at every step.”

Conversely, companies that shortcut their design and development process simply to accelerate speed to market run the risk of discovering core device functionality issues at later stages when these deficiencies are much more costly in time and money to correct.

Another way that the Insight Innovation Center helps to mitigate risk is by leveraging a wide variety of prototyping tools at every step of development to uncover other areas of risk well in advance of industrialisation.

User experience prototypes can help with feature selection, user preference selection and early usability feedback. Research and human factors play a huge role in ensuring that the right features and patient support characteristics are in place. They confirm and document that the device is designed to be safe, effective and support optimal user experiences.

Technical prototypes can be developed to minimise risk in the highest risk components and subsystems. Prototypes are used throughout development to reduce risk as early as possible, when changes can be made quicker and easier resulting in a more agile development process. These early stage tools help to prove how well certain designs or technologies address the functional requirements before core to function assemblies are integrated into the system design.

Ensuring manufacturing input is provided early to get early buy-in to the industrialisation plan is another value to all capabilities being under one roof. By securing early stage input from manufacturing, technical details like tooling strategies are shared to ensure that proof of design prototyping is done the right way. Incorporating input on geometries, materials and functionality early on can have a significantly positive impact and result in more cost effective, efficient and robust manufacturing solutions.

This focus on risk mitigation by obtaining manufacturing input early in the development cycle once again illustrates the value of end-to-end offerings under one roof. Delivering robust and reliable commercial manufacturing outputs requires a detailed understanding of the product and associated manufacturing processes and makes sure that these industrialisation factors are considered early in development.

Increased Capability to Reinforce Patient Centricity

Nemera’s mantra has long been “We put patients first”. The integration of the two companies better positions Nemera to deliver highly patient-centric solutions that encourage adherence and provide better healthcare outcomes. Extending capabilities further upstream with user research, user experience design and human factors engineering allows Nemera to integrate more patient information into design and gain a deeper understanding of user needs.

This sensitivity to the needs of the patient also guides the design team as they identify potential for use errors or experiential gaps that can be addressed through the development of materials beyond the device such as better instructions for use (IFUs), novel training methods, or value-added packaging.

“By executing a robust user verification testing process, we’re better able to understand how users interact with our devices which ultimately lead to safe and effective products,” says Bernhard Rohn, VP of marketing and strategy. “In addition, the keen understanding of the user experience can help us design products that can make a real difference in the quality of our patients’ lives by supporting every stage along the patient’s journey.”

Nemera’s CEO Marc Hämel agrees, “...understanding patient needs and translating that into impactful product designs aligns perfectly with our purpose to ‘put patients first’. We take patients’ needs into account at every stage of the product development cycle…”.

Nemera and its newly branded Insight Innovation Center

Nemera is a world leader in the design, development and manufacturing of drug delivery devices for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and generics industries. Nemera’s newly branded Insight Innovation Center, provides consultative services to support customers overall device strategy. The Insight Innovation Center leverages a cross-disciplinary team of 150 to develop tailored solutions across multiple device platforms.

Users are at the centre of everything that Nemera does in its effort to always put patients first.