Cannabis Packaging

Embossed Wallet for Sublingual Strip

PAT REYNOLDS, VP EDITOR EMERITUS, PACKAGING WORLD

1. Cannabis fi rm Kin Slips added a semi-automated pouch packaging system for its sublingual strip.

TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS

2. The system only requires one or two operators to interact with the line, placing and advancing pouches. 3. The paperboard wallet features a unique embossed effect produced by refurbished letter press machines.

Arecurring theme when it comes to packaging of cannabis is the transition from having an army of people in manual mode to an operation where automated or semi-automated systems reduce the amount of packaging that’s done by hand.

That transition took place recently at San Francisco-based Kin Slips. Now operating at the fi rm is a semi-automated pouch packaging system that lets one or two operators perform the tasks for which several were required in the recent past. Says CEO Josh Kirby, “We’re very glad that’s over with.”

The rotary system for fi lling and sealing premade pouches that Kin Slips fi lls was installed in the summer of 2019. Before exploring how it works, it’s important to point out that the product being packaged is a sublingual strip. As for the premade pouch that serves as the primary package, it comes from Fortis Solutions Group. The pouch is a three-side-sealed pouch made from a three-layer lamination consisting of reverse-printed matte polypropylene/metallized polyester/polyethylene. These pouches arrive in 2,500-count corrugated cases. An operator puts the pouches into four magazines in a Pouchmaster ABS system supplied by About Packaging Robotics Inc. A . A vacuum cup picker picks up four pouches at a time from the four magazines and rotates to the station at which two operators sit. The operators put a slip into each pouch and then one of them hits a foot pedal to advance the four pouches to a station where the ambient air is pressed out and a heatseal bar seals the pouches closed. Then the pouches drop into a bin. All that’s left is for

the operator to place the pouches into the secondary packaging, which Kirby refers to as a “wallet.” The wallet is closed and then a pressure-sensitive paper label is applied. Applied to the bottom is a second pressure-sensitive label that has all of the specifi c batch information that is required.

The paperboard secondary packaging, or wallet, comes from Studio on Fire. “They have this amazing letterpress studio where they’ve been able to refurbish these old letter press machines that lets them make a beautiful package for us,” says Kirby. “By its very nature, it’s a relatively slow process, which is why you don’t see it used for packages that are produced in huge volumes. But for us it produces a beautiful and precise embossing eff ect. And when you’re in a business like ours where you can’t sell outside your own state lines, large volumes are never an issue.”

Part 1 Sterile Manufacturing Training Gets Immersive with VR

KEREN SOOKNE, DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL CONTENT

1. One company sought to change pharmaceutical technician training, including concepts of aseptic technique, with virtual reality.

TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS

2. Virtual reality is transcending boundaries to enable remote expert instruction and hands-on skill building focused on the “why.” 3. A setup of a computer, hand devices, a headset, and a couple of sensors can immerse trainees in an environment to practice.

If we know that teaching operators to a test or a specific machine doesn’t work that well, why hasn’t training changed in decades? One company set out to change things with on-demand virtual reality (VR) training, which offers promise in teaching concepts resulting in more well-rounded staff that can move to other machines and facilities. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we’ll delve into how VR can help some of the issues seen in common training scenarios.

Virtuosi is a training platform developed by Quality Executive Partners, Inc. (QxP), a management consulting firm specializing in compliance consulting for the life sciences industry. The company’s leadership has extensive backgrounds as former executives at global pharmaceutical firms.

“In the pharmaceutical industry, the way we educate people has regressed a bit since many of us started our careers, myself in the ’90s,” says Brian Duncan, chief operations officer at QxP. “We saw that foundational education just wasn’t being done anymore. Predominantly it’s not really education as much as it is teaching people to follow a procedure, a step-by-step process.”

Train the trainer challenges

One issue is that subject matter experts (SMEs) are highly leveraged within most organizations, spending much of their time troubleshooting issues and establishing or updating standards and procedures. This leaves little time or opportunity for company experts to engage in a meaningful way with educating staff at the shop floor or benchtop level. Second, some technically skilled operators aren’t natural teachers, at times lacking the understanding of what a student needs to know or what they may find challenging.

These were both common themes the consulting company encountered among small and large organizations. Often, training means sitting in a new employee orientation session with days of

mind-numbing slideshows, where somebody points out what might be on a quiz.

On-the-job (OJT) training typically follows more of a see, do, teach approach. A trainer points out some critical concepts, watches the new employee try the technique, and then signs them off. “That has a lot of limitations,” Duncan says. “Looking at high-risk operations such as aseptic manufacturing, the employee may learn, ‘I don’t put my hand there,’ but they should really know the principle of why you don’t put your hand there. Why do you need to sanitize surfaces and equipment? We realized that there was a need, and we wanted to find a way that we could help these companies in finding a way to scale quality, technical education.”

Why VR?

“We had tried to develop educational materials, training courses, and certification programs for individuals to leverage these SMEs from within pharma organizations, train them on the right content so that they could go out and teach others… a train the trainer concept,” explains Duncan. “We found out very quickly that has a lot of limitations. On one such project, for example, we prepared a comprehensive program of microbiological content only to eventually certify six of the initial 65 candidates resulting from limitations in SME availability, breadth of technical knowledge, or teaching capability.”

↑ A setup of a computer, hand devices, a headset, and a couple of sensors can immerse trainees in an environment to practice.

The company looked at a number of digital video platforms alone, but VR piqued the company’s interest because it seemed to be the only medium that could transcend boundaries in a remote way to enable both expert instruction and hands-on skill building focused on the “why.”

“NO ONE WAS USING VR IN PHARMACEUTICAL EDUCATION TO FULLY LEVERAGE THESE CAPABILITIES… THAT LED US TO THE MEDICAL SURGICAL COMMUNITY… SOME OF THE DATA WE SEE IS THAT FOLKS WHO ARE TRAINED IN VRASSISTED CURRICULA ARE 29% FASTER AND SIX TIMES LESS LIKELY TO MAKE A MISTAKE WHEN THEY TRY IT FOR THE FIRST TIME ON THEIR OWN.”

-QxP’s Brian Duncan

When QxP decided to go down this road, they studied the landscape. “No one was using VR in pharmaceutical education to fully leverage these capabilities,” Duncan explains. So they asked themselves, who uses VR for education and has learned to do it successfully? “That led us to the medical surgical community,” he says. They focused on lessons learned and publicly available scientific studies with control groups and real data. “Some of the data we see is that folks who are trained in VR-assisted curricula are 29% faster and six times less likely to make a mistake when they try it for the first time on their own.”

A setup of a computer, hand devices, a headset, and a couple of sensors can immerse trainees in an environment to practice.

“We wanted to bring that same impact to the pharmaceutical industry and to scale learning,” Duncan explains. “The great thing about practicing is you can make mistakes, and when you make mistakes, depending on how you program your VR, it can coach you in real-time. And unlike an OJT trainer, it knows exactly where the trainee put their hands. It’s never distracted, and it’s always watching exactly what you do.”

Nuts and bolts

The Virtuosi product itself is set up with episodes—technical modules—that build upon one another with the focus on educating staff in the foundational principles explaining the “why” behind the

tasks performed every day. Such contextual understanding enables critical thinking and directly influences the skills and behaviors needed to perform sterile manufacturing and microbiology testing.

Technical experts worked to lay out a comprehensive series of topics with defined learning objectives, then leveraged VR to take the trainees’ understanding and lessons learned into the actual environment in which they would be operating. For example: • People can enter a sterile filling line to learn about aseptic connections, seeing an exercise and then trying it on their own. • Trainees can learn critical aspects of environmental monitoring (EM) programs. “Students can figure out what goes into designing an EM sampling plan within a manufacturing filling suite. What are my hot points and why? What kind of samples do I pull from there and why? What factors do I need to consider in developing that sampling scheme?” says Duncan.

“Our technical experts have spent entire careers building sterile facilities, building course materials, and teaching these topics. We paired deep subject matter expertise with a thoughtfully selected VR partner,” Duncan notes. “We selected a VR partner that used predominantly classically trained engineers, who knew and appreciated the science behind what we were trying to achieve, in addition to computer programming. So when we look at things like airflow, they know the principles of fluid dynamics behind what we are creating.”

The company saw a need to move from a check-the-box, qualification-based training paradigm back toward educating on principles and providing on-demand, experiential educational opportunities. • In total, there are 31 episodes in the first series of Virtuosi, each about 60 to 90 minutes long. • Complimenting the technical lectures—delivered via a cloudbased multimodal platform—are 18 VR interactive experiences (approximately 30 minutes each). Depending on the number of iterations one goes through in the VR sessions, it’s approximately 80 hours of content. • Within each episode are coached process checks to ensure engagement and understanding, and there is a knowledge assessment at the conclusion of each episode that must be passed in order to receive credit.

The company received support from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which reviewed the program as a primary beta partner in the pilot program in advance of its commercial launch in Q1 of 2020. “MHRA promotes innovation across all stages of the pharmaceutical lifecycle and provides regulatory advice to stakeholders through initiatives such as its Innovation Office. The MHRA’s inspectorate welcomes the opportunity to support and adopt new technology such as innovative approaches to delivering education,” an MHRA spokesperson told Pharmacy Business.

Stay tuned for the second installment of this two-part series in the next issue, covering the hidden costs of limited training and nonconformances.

A New View

The concept of a smoke study is fairly understandable, but VR allows the student to see things and interact with the environment in a novel way, opening myriad opportunities to engage learners through experiential learning models. VR not only lets one see the movement of airflow; but it can also place the person inside the filling line to interact with the airflow in the form of visible smoke.

Duncan says, “In the past, demonstrating the same principle in a video format would literally require putting a person in a room to watch 12 hours’ worth of smokes studies,” looking for events such as the background interfering with the flow, or a door where there is turbid airflow. “To show interrupted unidirectional airflow through classical methods, a company would need video that was very clear, had good contrast and backgrounds to see the smoke— and a bad study because we had to see disrupted air that you’re not supposed to see. VR not only allows you to see it, but you can also interact with it and create those conditions in real time to understand the principles and the interaction between differently shaped objects and their positions and movements on a filling line.”